But his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalisation of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in.
And, of course, a theme of this essay is that these predictions did not in fact come true when Burnham predicted them, and did not generally prove out over the next 20-30 years. We could debate what happened in the 80s, but the context is so different that Burnham might not have much to say about it.