I have to say there's a good chance that society is already moving toward Russell's ideal.
If you just look at accelerators like YCombinator, you'll see that two successful startups (Dropbox and AirBnb) are by-and-large paying for the investment of the other several hundred startups several times over.
So when will we see it going to the next level? Gather a bunch of people together, using whatever criteria you see fit, and tell them to do whatever they want. Pay for their room and board, and see what is produced from their complete leisure time. If the produce of that investment was one of the individuals simply having an idea on the scale of something like "Democracy" or "Altruism", wouldn't it be completely worth it if the other individuals never did anything more than eat, sleep, and play video games?
We called those "housing projects" and they were not exactly a paradise to live in. Superficially need some minimal level of education/civilization. Which merely excludes those bored by formal education, most of whom are idiots and a small fraction of them are geniuses. For lack of a better idea you could use some weighted GPA/IQ/GRE/SAT/ACT score system. Assuming the smartest people are those who come up with the best ideas. It does seem that to spread an idea you need a smart dude but a think tank should hire marketing people for that? Perhaps a lotto would work just as well for selection. A lotto instead of elections would likely give us a superior government, perhaps it would give us superior ideas on average.
Another interesting example is the Institute for Advanced Studies nearby Princeton, I think. You might want to examine whats been produced there.
Surely YCombinator and startup culture is the antithesis of what Russell is talking about as being desirable? The legions of burned out coders would probably not equate crunch time with leisure time.
If you just look at accelerators like YCombinator, you'll see that two successful startups (Dropbox and AirBnb) are by-and-large paying for the investment of the other several hundred startups several times over.
So when will we see it going to the next level? Gather a bunch of people together, using whatever criteria you see fit, and tell them to do whatever they want. Pay for their room and board, and see what is produced from their complete leisure time. If the produce of that investment was one of the individuals simply having an idea on the scale of something like "Democracy" or "Altruism", wouldn't it be completely worth it if the other individuals never did anything more than eat, sleep, and play video games?