The Economist is wrong because they underestimate two important factors, of which the most important is sheer bureaucratic inertia. In practically all western air forces, the career path of high-ranking officers is that of a fighter pilot. Decades of propaganda and bureaucratic infighting have established the fighter pilot as one of the celebrated heroes of the modern military, and the core identity of the air force. That won't be given up easily. The move to unmanned aircraft would mean that bold, gutsy and manly fighter pilots will be replaced by guys with Playstation controllers, and even if the latter are more effective in combat, they're just not cricket. In Top Gun 2020, the young fighter jocks won't barge their way into a bar, drink like mad and wow the girls with their rendition of Great Balls of Fire on the piano; they'll sit in the corner, order some apple juice and turn up the J-Pop.
Bureaucratic inertia is made even worse by the fact that air forces the world over are still, to some extent, young services fighting to establish themselves. Go back 50 years and witness the intense fighting on both sides of the Atlantic: in the States, over whether the army is allowed to operate fixed-wing aircraft or not, and in the UK over who controls naval aviation. That may seem like a long time ago, but in both countries, there is a level at which air forces still perceive themselves as younger and less secure services than the other two. Unmanned aircraft question the very existence of a separate air force: if, after all, you're just going to fly drones, then the army already has people doing just that. Why would they need a special service of their own? The navy could easily ditch naval aviation in favor of NCOs flying drones off their ships. It's not just the pilots that will go, after all, but nearly all of the support staff and facilities will be rendered irrelevant. The massive fixed airbases that were such a huge liability in the cold war will finally meet their end.
It's a well-established fact of defense policy that the armed services will, in the pursuit of administrative goals and inter-service rivalries, make inefficient decisions. What makes this even worse is the lack of a real military-technological rivalry to drive development forward. Unlike in the cold war, the US doesn't have a real technological challenger. The Russians can still produce very good aircraft, but nothing with which to really challenge the F-22 and F-35 in terms of pure technology. In its current decrepit state, Russia is still years away from being able to mount any kind of challenge to US air superiority, and China is much further away.
Remember that in the cold war, Western fighter development was basically driven by intelligence panics. A new Soviet prototype would show up on the runway at Ramenskoye and be spotted by a US reconnaisance satellite; then the intelligence guys would try to figure out what characteristics it had. Because of the difficulty of getting solid intelligence out of the Soviet Union, this was mostly guesswork, and regularly led to incredible overestimates of Soviet capabilities. The actual characteristics of a plane like the Su-24 Fencer had almost nothing to do with the intelligence projections, but because all they had to go on were the more-or-less informed guesses of their intelligence, Western aircraft were produced to face a much more powerful threat than the real one. For instance, the F-15 Eagle, which some people consider the greatest air superiority fighter of the 20th century, was essentially created to meet and defeat what the West imagined the MiG-25 Foxbat to be. The MiG-25 was seen at a runway somewhere, and the intel guys panicked. "It's got swing wings and two engines OH MY GOD IT CAN DO MACH FOUR AND HAS MISSILES THE SIZE OF MY HOUSE!" The actual aircraft was, well, different, but the threat of the imagined MiG-25 drove the US to create the F-15. There's nothing like the Ramenskoye panics driving aircraft design now.
This combination of a lack of research impetus and real air threat simply means that the Americans can be quite content with a substandard jack-of-all-trades, master-of-fuck-all aircraft like the F-35, and even inflict it on unsuspecting allies at a gigantic price. Even if drones would be cheaper and more effective, the West can settle for the far more expensive and ineffective manned aircraft, because they're good enough. It also, in all likelihood, means that since a new generation of pilots will be trained up on the F-35, they will fight just as hard against the inevitable as their predecessors did, and will probably manage to secure a next generation of manned aircraft for themselves. After all, think of all the jobs that would be lost.
As a side note, maybe this could restart the US space program. After all, the air force will need something to do.
In summary, assuming, say, the US Air Force will switch to unmanned aircraft in the near future assumes a level of rational decision-making that is totally alien to any peacetime military establishment. As a piece of military hardware, the manned aircraft will far outlive its usefulness. As the Economist put it in a more recent piece, the pilot in the cockpit may be an endangered species, but he's surrounded by a gigantic bureaucracy dedicated to his preservation.
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And besides, the drones will just get taken over by Skynet anyway.
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