Colin Mortimer

About Me

This is my personal website. I am a Senior Director at the Progressive Policy Institute, where I travel around the country and world to advocate for center-left policies and reforms. In college, I founded the Center for New Liberalism. After doing that as a side project for a few years, it became my full-time job in January 2020. Previously, I was an antitrust consultant with Bates White Economic Consulting.

I hold a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics-Statistics from the University of Connecticut. My thesis was entitled "Red District, Blue District: The Effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on Congressional Outcomes. "

My Writing & Press Mentions

• The Hill: Democrats lost the immigration high ground. For what?
  "But Democrats, in opposing President Trump’s cruel immigration policies, ended up reflexively adopting a politically disastrous agenda of their own. They coupled a reasonable stance on legal and humanitarian immigration with border policies that voters found deeply unpopular. The resulting loss of credibility cost Democrats the political capital needed to do anything truly meaningful on immigration. Even worse, it handed Republicans a potent campaign issue — one they successfully used to win. By aiding Republicans politically, Democrats have de facto aided in the Republican efforts to end the American immigration system as we know it."

• Politico: Some U.S. progressives see Britain’s Keir Starmer as a lone center-left warrior if Donald Trump wins.
  “If Harris does lose and Trump wins in November, the U.K. really has to step up in the West, within liberal democracies, and be the beacon for a lot of really important ideas,” said Colin Mortimer, director of the Center for New Liberalism, a center left campaign group with international chapters across the globe. 

• Columbia Journalism Review: The New Old Liberals
  "Mortimer, who runs CNL operations from Washington, described the group as “pragmatic Democrats” who want to achieve “progressive goals but without a revolution.” As a disaffected Bernie Sanders supporter, Mortimer underscored that the group might share many of the aspirations of the far left but differ on how to get there."

• Wall Street Journal: When Your Dog Eats Your Apple AirTag
  "Colin Mortimer knew there was trouble when his dog Sassy started beeping. He’d been trying to locate a lost AirTag, the $29 Bluetooth device designed by Apple Inc. to help people keep tabs on their keys, luggage and other personal items. This particular AirTag normally attaches to his other dog’s collar, letting him keep track of her location."

• Washington Post Magazine: Can these Gen Z and millennial wonks make neoliberalism cool again?
  "Bernie Sanders had run in the primary against Hillary Clinton and, for the first time in a while, the Democratic Party had been divided between the left and the center-left,” recalls Colin Mortimer, the 25-year-old director of the Center for New Liberalism, who was a college student at the time. “It wasn’t like there were rational Republicans to ally with — Donald Trump had won the presidency. People on the center-left felt adrift and were looking to coalesce and create community.”

• Vox:  The biggest missed opportunity of the lame-duck Congress so far
  "But the failure of federal permitting reform underscores a real reluctance to match talk with action. Republicans have long called for permitting reform, only to oppose it when the opportunity for political payback beckoned. Progressives in Congress have long been the loudest voices for fighting climate change. But the intensity of their rhetoric isn’t coupled with policy moves that could put the US on a faster track to a clean energy future."

• Student Loan Cancellation Not Only Has Dubious Policy Merits But Will Also Fail To Achieve Its Political Goals
  "If student loan debt is forgiven by executive order, will Congressional Democrats, who by the very nature of executive action will not be involved in the decision, get credit for it?"

• Newsweek: The House's Salt Cap Proposal Is Bad Policy And Bad Politics
  "On average, a mere 13.8 percent of constituents living in districts represented by SALT Caucus members will receive more than 80 percent of the total tax cut if the SALT cap is raised to $80,000."

• NY Daily News: Rail Against Business As Usual: Yes, The U.S. Needs Better Trains, But It Must Innovate To Get Them
  "Amtrak’s marquee high-speed rail service, Acela, in fact takes longer to go from New York to D.C. than its predecessor Metroliner did decades ago."

• There’s No Work To Disincentivize
  "The longer the United States continues to hobble along with a half-hearted economy during a deadly pandemic, the worse the long-term damages will be that will reverberate in our economy for decades to come."

• Let The Hongkongers In
  "Hongkongers should be paroled and be able to seek immediate work authorization so that they can bring their expertise, ingenuity, and work-ethic to the American economy."

• How Modern Neoliberals Rediscovered Neoliberalism
  "Neoliberalism began with a simple desire: to chart a path between unfettered free markets and socialism. Anything between those two extremes fell more or less within neoliberalism’s tent. Today’s neoliberals are remarkably similar."

• The Incentive to Build
  "Government is a vetocracy, where too many people have a say in processes where one “no” could derail it all. Government broadly has developed a broad aversion to power, where elected officials, bureaucrats, and private actors who want to build things are demonized and shot down for trying to do so. In short, we are not just not incentivizing building, but we are actively disincentivizing building."

• Let Everyone Vote By Mail
  "Some officials and organizations have warned that postal is more vulnerable to fraud than in-person voting, but the evidence makes it clear that this is not true. The decentralized nature of postal voting means that widespread fraud would require infiltrating the postal system itself to commit fraud, while in-person voter fraud requires only the infiltration of a singular machine or ballot box."

• We Could Have Had Bennet
  "But we live in an environment where politics is becoming increasingly polarized and the media’s incentives are increasingly skewed toward radicalization. So, it is no surprise that Michael Bennet and moderates like him have failed to catch fire under the primary election paradigm."

• The Myth Of The Overton Window
  "Shifts in the Overton window do not come about simply with the suggestion of radical policy proposals. Change only comes in the face of a tidal wave of evidence and an energized advocacy strategy."

• Why We’re Polarized
  "Our political identities have not only become prioritized, but also tangled up in all our other ones."

• Why High-Speed Rail Has Failed
  "The problem with high-speed rail is not high-speed rail itself. It is a legal and structural problem. It is a problem that cannot be addressed by sheer will to simply lay down electrified track. It is a problem that requires shifting American culture away from feckless incrementalism and distrust of our political institutions to one that values change and visionary institutions that are willing to take risks to make the country a better place to live."

• Leftward, U+48 U+6f!
  "So, why are we moving Left? It’s because non-mainstream ideas can organize more effectively than ever on the internet, and the internet exposes us to an incredible amount of diversity."

• Houston Chronicle: Without Better Climate Policies, The Green New Deal Won’t Work
  "But nuclear power, despite widely publicized incidents in Fukushima and Three Mile Island, is the safest form of power generation. It is even safer than wind and solar because it does not require dangerous climbing to maintain, and it would also create thousands of high-paying jobs for both white- and blue-collar workers."

Problems I am Interested In

• How do we reverse the internet's tendency to breed extremism and polarize?

• America is short 5 million homes as of 2021. Housing has typically been a state and local issue. How can the federal government advance the YIMBY agenda?

• 100,000 - 200,000 Americans die each year from air pollution exposure. How can we encourage scientific advancement and roll out the necessary reforms to get this number to zero?

• How can we speed up the timelines for infrastructure projects in America?

• Immigration has proven benefits not only for immigrants themselves, but the countries they move to. How can we create a policy framework that promotes dramatic increases in immigration while minimizing backlash? 

• What is the next "unleaded gasoline" — a policy that dramatically positive societal effects?

• How can we maintain the United State's GDP growth and subsequently remain the world economic leader?

Good Books

• Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri
  The internet undermines traditional structures of communication and information transmission.  This has subsequently harmed the effectiveness of government and advocacy organizations, which have yet to fully grapple with this paradigm shift.

• Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
  As recently as a century ago, the U.S. government required members of the Osage Native American tribe to have appointed "guardians" white people who had near total control of their finances. After the Osage Nation got unbelievably rich off the oil boom, guardians began to systemically murder the Osage to inherit their oil rights. 

• The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
  How excesses in technocracy and data-driven management led the U.S. into Vietnam and doomed us to lose the war.

• The Power Broker by Robert Caro
  A cautionary tale, but also a great explanation of what America has lost due to its inability to build.

• Traffic by Ben Smith
  The birth, rise and fall of digital media in the '00s and '10s, with a focus on Buzzfeed and Gawker.

Good Newsletters

• Apricitas Economics

• Cocktails With Suderman

• Noahpinion

• Slow Boring

Good Articles and Papers 

• How Newt Gingrich Destroyed American Politics - The Atlantic
  Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.

• How American Politics Went Insane - The Atlantic
  It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.

• Does Pollution Drive Achievement? The Effect of Traffic Pollution on Academic Performance
  We examine the effect of school traffic pollution on student outcomes by leveraging variation in wind patterns for schools the same distance from major highways. We compare within-student achievement for students transitioning between schools near highways, where one school has had greater levels of pollution because it is downwind of a highway. Students who move from an elementary/middle school that feeds into a “downwind” middle/high school in the same zip code experience decreases in test scores, more behavioral incidents, and more absences, relative to when they transition to an upwind school. Even within zip codes, microclimates can contribute to inequality.

• The Impact of Medicaid Expansion on Voter Participation: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
  In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery for the chance to apply for Medicaid. Using this randomized design and state administrative data on voter behavior, we analyze how a Medicaid expansion affected voter turnout and registration. We find that Medicaid increased voter turnout in the November 2008 Presidential election by about 7 percent overall, with the effects concentrated in men (18 percent increase) and in residents of democratic counties (10 percent increase); there is suggestive evidence that the increase in voting reflected new voter registrations, rather than increased turnout among pre-existing registrants. There is no evidence of an increase in voter turnout in subsequent elections, up to and including the November 2010 midterm election.

Good YouTube Channels

• James Hoffmann's
  On coffee, particularly his pour-over and Japanese iced coffee videos

• Anders Erickson
  On cocktails

• Wendover Productions
  On explaining interesting things 

• RedLetterMedia
  On movie reviews

• Grainydays
  On film photography