Vonnegut made most of his points by extrapolating trends out to ridiculous extremes. Harrison Bergeron is the classic example. The flaw in taking such things seriously (as opposed to allegorically) is that the setup presumes people are clever enough to recognize the advantages but too stupid to see the drawbacks. You aren't supposed to study them as models of society, you're supposed to study them to examine human nature under pressure. That said, Tamim Ansari observed that the Ottoman Empire was crushed under the technological innovation of Europe not because Ottomans weren't clever, but because Ottoman society employed vast hordes of people in all sorts of positions that would have risen up and overthrown the aristocracy if they were made idle.