So for the sake of fairness, no one should get to work less hours?
It's pretty clear that Russell's sentiment is that this should be expanded to society as a whole.
Certain areas are clearly broken - education, medicine, and housing -- but that's largely due to government interference.
That has not been proven. If anything the opposite. I'm sure that a significant portion of the population would choose less time at work over non-essential consumption given the choice. There's a reason that full-time working hours are always changed universally - having the leverage and the economic base to individually request part-time is a privilege. Furthermore there's usually a disproportional economic punishment when one's working hours doesn't reach some "full-time" threshold, not to mention the likely social punishment like having a harder time to get promoted and similar.
People like to assume that people choose non-essential goods over leisure but for some reason they are never very keen on trying to prove it by giving workers the choice without undue punishment.
A good experiment could be to allow people to choose to whether they'd like to get their raise (or if lucky, convert the yearly bonus) in time or money, or perhaps some split.
> but that's largely due to government interference.
Only in the US it seems.
What happens is that those 4 can go do something else; now in reality that something else is often not as good as what they were doing before or else they would have already been doing it.
But people are not static and can improve, develop skills, and learn new things. Also prices normally go down, which encourages innovation, and can create whole new classes of jobs.
For instance before medical imaging we didn't have x-ray technicians, etc - But I'm glad that new field was created.