If I have become God, and am now able to pull the levers so that anything I want will happen, the first thing I would do is that I’d change the climate back. I’m God, so I can do that. That would take care of all the droughts, global warming and all the rest of it. Then, and this would be an odd thing for God to do, I would rid the world of belief in God. In my world, everyone would be an atheist.
Then, I’d take all the people who ran, say, the largest 50 financial institutions in the world—they are all currently men—and I would replace every one of them with a woman. After that, I would take the six or seven biggest companies in Silicon Valley, and I’d move them to places that have serious unemployment. So I would move Google to, say, West Virginia. And I would move Intel to Oklahoma. Facebook would relocate to Amish country, in Pennsylvania.
And I’d compel all of these companies’ employees to move, which means I would shift a lot of liberal voters out of California where they are not needed and into the swing states. I guess the easier thing to do would be just to change the Electoral College system, but I think my idea would be a lot more fun. Imagine moving the companies and just waiting to see what happened. If you can see Memphis, Tennessee, transformed by one company—Federal Express—then you could transform an entire state by giving it Google.
Microsoft and Amazon are both based in Seattle at the moment, and they don’t need the two of them up there. So I’d move one of them, let’s say Amazon, out to Columbus, Ohio.
All of this means that I would have lowered the value of real estate back in Silicon Valley, which is a good thing because I would have opened it up so that even more young geeks could move in to start up with their new ideas. They would create more businesses to fill the void left by the others.
I would not make everyone read all of my books. No, that would be cruel and I would have no impulse in that direction. But I would decree that everybody on the planet would have to live at least a year of their youth—like college age time—with a family that didn’t speak their language so they’d have felt experience of an entirely different culture. And that would go for everybody. You couldn’t grow up in a small town in America, or anywhere, and think that it was the whole world. So everybody would have some inter-cultural experience.
And one more thing. I would rewire humanity slightly so that they would be much more sexually attracted to members of different ethnicities than their own. That would create lots of miscegenation. Lots of interracial marriage and breeding. And so basically you start to eliminate race.
Though thinking about it, it’s probably easier to move Google. You could do that with a tax incentive.
