#paulmason

Paul Mason

Paul Mason moved to be the Project Lead in one of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley. He started Mastering the Manly Arts, a passion project that aims to help men gain the skills and confidence to establish themselves in the dating field. Mason applied the knowledge and experience he gained in the workplace and his own interpersonal skills and understanding of the opposite sex to teach men how to increase their chances of success in the dating field.

Over the next few years, Mason invested heavily in his own research and education to discover how to improve sexual health through nutrition and exercise. In 2019, Mason relaunched Mastering the Manly Arts, with a revamped concept that involves health, nutrition, psychology, and self-development to help men establish themselves and progress into healthy, attractive, and appealing individuals.

If I understood it correctly, Paul Mason's piece about over-staffed car washes in The Guardian makes the basic point that the UK economy relies too heavily on cheap labour rather than technological innovation. Other recent reports say real wages in the UK have shockingly not risen over the previous 20 years due to poor productivity. The economic theory goes that real gains in wealth only come from improved productivity. Yes, you can employ ten men to dig a hole and then fill it in again, but because the exercise has zero economic value, there will be no economic gains to share out amongst them. If you pay them, you will only cause problems further down the line or elsewhere in the economy. 

All this reminded me of a gripe I have with the neighbour over the road. He parks his big black BMW on the road outside my house instead of outside his own house, I think, because he doesn’t like getting leaves on the beloved vehicle’s roof. And there it sits, for weeks on end. Once I noticed it had gone and I took the opportunity to park my Vespa in the vacated space. (Very petty, I know). But inevitably the ugly tonne of gleaming black metal reappeared, and wasn’t moved again for weeks. 

Since my wife wrote off my car by driving it into a tree on Ealing Common when learning to drive, I have viewed privately owned cars as completely pointless in London. You have a car because you’ve always had one since you were 18 and then your car sits on the road while you go to work on the tube or to the shops on your bicycle. It’s a sign you are a Man. Your car sits on prime London real estate for weeks on end without moving, without adding anything to the economy. Of course you pay for this privilege through your road tax. But because there’s no economic value added in this exercise, like the men digging the hole and filling it in again, this payment does nothing for the economy. 

A far better value adding thing for that tonne of the world’s resources to be doing would be to be moving all day long, every minute of its useful life, transporting people and things here and there. Isn’t that what Uber does? And thanks to its technology, it does it uber-efficiently. Traditional mini cabs waste a journey by returning to base to collect another fare. Uber eliminates this waste by connecting the driver to the next fare somewhere near where it has finished the last one. It’s so clever. But of course Uber is a dirty word in liberal circles. To return to Mason’s piece, where he calls for technology to be used instead of people to do car washes, his other main point is that the benefits of a more economically efficient technology-based car wash should be fairly distributed. It’s the same with Uber. A fantastically efficient new business model has been found, now the government must ensure the spoils of the economic value it generates are fairly shared. And can they also find a way of encouraging my neighbour to sell his car?