They changed the rules in my country. You can buy a truck but I'll be taxed like a personal car instead of light cargo, unless you have a business and it's a company car. That seriously curbed the eagerness to buy one.
Because small creators are basically forced to take chances and be creative to survive with limited budgets while big corpo can take the boring safe bet and the big money attracts people that have a lot of talent for personal marketing and not much else while the number of people involved makes everything a design by committee.
And when the car is drivable you do a demo for the customer to show what it'll look like, somebody in the room will ask what the flight ceiling is and things first go very quiet and then very loud. After much discussion it turns out they actually need a flying car. Of course there is no additional budget for that.
Money is power in this society, and billionaires have the most money. See also climate change what is again the choice between a few hundred billionaires and a livable planet, and the billionaires are winning.
Fertility rates and what influences them have been discusses a lot. It's something influences by a multitude of factors, and each region in the world has a different mix or ratio of factors, so that makes it hard to disentangle. Income, inequality, living cost, childcare cost, housing cost, societal expectations, double income families, commuting, urbanization and environment less suitable for children, pressure to be productive, promotions as status, prioritization of spending money on goods and travel, change in gender roles, dating and marriage changed, more single people, pressure to monitor and invest more time in children, economic instability, the increasing threat of AI and robots taking job ... The list continues.
The main problem for modern society is that these things can't be changed without modifying society itself and/or lots of money is involved. So policy makers are stuck. They're under pressure to increase fertility rate but only in a way that it doesn't cost employers money and makes sure that consumption of goods doesn't drop. They also have to make sure there are enough workers but increasing immigration is problematic. The end result is that they do some token gestures and just let it play out. They probably hope that big tech arrives with their AI and robots to do the jobs and help with elderly care.
Guess what traits tend to make for people better at securing and conserving power within groups, and keeping loyalty within their ranks?
In a time of crisis. The biggest downside of these leaders is that they keep creating new crises to stay in power. There are cases of killing such a leader because of that.
And in a lot of leaders, their status was defined for how much they could give away and how generous they were, not how tough they were.
Then there is religion, that manages to encoded certain rules and pass them on to the next generations.
Because they want to build and experiment without all the red tape. Of course they do and people have to relearn why regulations are written in blood.
They hate the FDA, but one of the reasons it exists was because some folks sold radioactive beverages, mascara that caused blindness, a bunch of snake oil and medicine that killed people and/or caused deformities.
Adventures with financial deregulation and crypto haven't been much better so far.
"Nuke the entire site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure" ~your immune system