Sterilizing at least 75% of the population for the sake of humanity.

Seriously, do you think there would be any point in being a billionaire if 75% of the world's population were gone? A billion dollars wouldn't even get you anything, since it's a credit against the labour of those people. You'd have plenty of space but your quality of life would be tanked. Here, let me tell you what you need to do. Come with me on a journey - to a fantastic place - where you are one of a handful of all-powerful decision makers, steering the globe to your every whim and desire.

First off you absolutely need a big global population, seriously, and you want to encourage and incentivise as many of them as possible to learn and produce much as possible. You want there to be enough genetic outliers in the population so that they can create new incredible things. You need top doctors to keep you healthy, top researchers, designers. Even top artists and musicians to develop the finest pleasures. Maybe most importantly, the guy who can design your yacht, or derive the machine learning routines to self-drive your Tesla.  Very few of them will reach these pinnacles, so you need a broad pyramid. They need other yachts to learn on, and textbooks and professors to teach them.

Second, you have to remember that even the others, who don't make it to the top, are important, but they will be the supporting cast whose demand for goods, labour, pension savings all contribute to this incredible economic vehicle which raises your quality of life beyond anyone that came before. There's no denying the reality that free trade and capitalism has been the single biggest generator of wealth in human history. And you want wealth. The more there is - the more your disproportionate slice of the pie gets you. So you need the whole package, society, people with jobs and houses and relationships and lives; only you need to keep them kind of in this holding pattern - they had better want to work, and work hard. More on that below.

A third more subtle point is that a lot of economic activity requires people to have different risk profiles, and time horizons, during the ageing process. Mortgage assets expand the money supply by indebting young adults, fattening balance sheet capital to write corporate loans. People invest in higher-risk assets when they're younger and risk-off as they age etc. So you need the ageing process, and you need new generations to replace them. Preferably more than a replacement - you want a growing population - to encourage those worker bees now that they can have a nice time when they retire (right!?). They need to be motivated, but not too motivated. Enough to keep striving, competing, but not enough to throw it all away on Hail Marys. It's not possible to design a precise enough system to achieve that, since everything is so interconnected. I guess we're lucky this time, that seems to happen naturally.

Finally, let's discuss what you really don't want. Well you don't want 'disruption', you don't want 'uncertainty'. These are just costs at the end of the day which slow down the economic progress you so desperately need. Wars and rebellions are a disaster; frankly any sort of independence is kind of a threat. You definitely don't want people to give up or opt-out. You need to keep them just incentivised enough to keep hustling during their best years, but not comfortable enough to stop. Your very worst outcome is your top achievers becoming comfortable too soon. Imagine if your heart surgeon earned enough to feel comfortable at 35; a nice homestead, happy wife and a couple of kids, enough stake in the equity of the economy that he didn't have to keep it all going. Well fifteen years later when you need a bypass, where is he - out fishing?? You can't abide that. Ideally, you don't want them to actually *own* anything; far better for them to rent it. That way, you get to own it, they keep labouring. Not only that but you get the passive income as well.

Along with self-sufficiency you don't want rabble-rousers, even critical thinkers. The best thing about owning everything is you can keep those people in line. The digital age is a godsend for you now. You can get these people deplatformed. If they're enough trouble you can debank them. Won't get a loan, won't get insurance. As long as they lack independent means, you've got them where you want them. If they do, you're just waiting for the metaverse. Once those lines between real life and the digital platforms of the oligarchy are blurred, you'll be able to deplatform them for real.

Of course, if you could do it, you'd love to just simply vanish some kinds of ideas outright. With enough power, you might be able to, but you'd need a vice grip on information. Perhaps with more development in psychology, behavioural studies and neuroscience they could come up with some rubrics for doing this. We all know humans are social, tribal animals - why not exploit that? In-group preference and ostracising disruptors, if you can get them young and enforce a scarcity mindset, they'll do anything not to be othered. Because we all know there's only so much, and if you aren't in, you're out. And if you're out, you are not gonna have a good time.

So let's bring it back around, since this was quite an adventure. I think it's clear that if you had all the power in the world - enough to snap your fingers and evaporate 75% of the planet - you probably wouldn't. I think you would probably come up with some sort of globalised economic system. In fact it might not look too different to today.

And yes I'm aware I'm in a Wendys. I'll have a Baconator please.