Adaner Usmani
Biographic Data
| ID | 4178656 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adaner Usmani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adaner |
| FAMILY NAME | Usmani |
| SIGNATURE | USMANI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8308-8762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Libertarian Case Against Property
The Racial Politics of Mass Incarceration
Many argue that America’s punitive turn was the result of racial backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. Yet some have noted support among black people for the policies attributed to this backlash, citing the influence of rising crime on black voters and politicians. In this article we gather new evidence and examine what it implies. Public opinion data show that not just the white but also the black public became more punitive after the 1960s. Vo…
The Currency of Racial Justice
Racial justice is widely seen as a central moral and political ideal of our time, especially on the liberal-egalitarian left. And racial justice goes hand in hand with racial equality. The centrality of these ideals would be hard to justify if they had no bearing on material or economic inequality, or applied solely to semiotic and cultural issues. But we argue that, at present, the only plausible basis for understanding racial equality as a dist…
How Segregation Ruins Inference
Why do many people underestimate economic and racial inequality and maintain that theirs is a meritocratic society? Existing work suggests that people are rationalizing, misinformed, or misled. This article proposes an additional explanation: Inequality itself makes economic and racial disparities difficult to understand. In unequal societies, individuals establish their networks at formative institutions patterned by class and race. As a result,…
Punishment in Modern Societies
The literature on the prevalence and causes of punishment has been dominated by research into the United States. Yet most of the world's prisoners live elsewhere, and the United States is no longer the country with the world's highest incarceration rate. This article considers what we know about the prevalence and causes of incarceration around the world. We focus on three features of incarceration: its level, inequality, and severity. Existing c…
Labor markets and incarceration
Studies have failed to show a positive effect of unemployment on incarceration despite reasons to expect such a relationship. We note that prior estimates have been muddied by the absence of substate data, a focus on prisons rather than on jails, limited measures of unemployment, and the fact that the health of the labor market is endogenous to incarceration. We instrument for local exposure to the rise of Chinese exports (“the China Shock”) to e…
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration
How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly…
The Long March
Over the last several decades, dozens of dictatorships have become democracies. Yet while each has held free and fair elections, they have varied in the extent to which their citizens realize the ideal of self-rule. Why do some democracies distribute power to citizens while other democracies withhold it? Existing research is suggestive, but its implications are ambiguous. Cross-national studies have focused on democracy’s formal dimensions, while…
Humans in the Loop
Survey data sets are often wider than they are long. This high ratio of variables to observations raises concerns about overfitting during prediction, making informed variable selection important. Recent applications in computer science have sought to incorporate human knowledge into machine-learning methods to address these problems. The authors implement such a 'human-in-the-loop' approach in the Fragile Families Challenge. The authors use surv…
Democracy and the Class Struggle
Why do societies today distribute political power more equally than before? Most scholars believe that this transition is explained by the rise of capitalism but have long disagreed about why it mattered. The author argues that dominant models fail to capture why capitalist development helps key actors win what they seek. Drawing on comparative and historical work, the author introduces a model of the democratic transition that centers on the con…
The Abject Condition of Labor in Pakistan
The strength of the trade union movement in Pakistan has ebbed and flowed over the course of the country's history, but today, after roughly twenty-five years of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, the movement is arguably at its weakest point in recent memory
Democracy and the Class Struggle
Why do societies today distribute political power more equally than before? Most scholars believe that this transition is explained by the rise of capitalism but have long disagreed about why it mattered. The author argues that dominant models fail to capture why capitalist development helps key actors win what they seek. Drawing on comparative and historical work, the author introduces a model of the democratic transition that centers on the con…
How Segregation Ruins Inference
Why do many people underestimate economic and racial inequality and maintain that theirs is a meritocratic society? Existing work suggests that people are rationalizing, misinformed, or misled. This article proposes an additional explanation: Inequality itself makes economic and racial disparities difficult to understand. In unequal societies, individuals establish their networks at formative institutions patterned by class and race. As a result,…
Labor markets and incarceration
Studies have failed to show a positive effect of unemployment on incarceration despite reasons to expect such a relationship. We note that prior estimates have been muddied by the absence of substate data, a focus on prisons rather than on jails, limited measures of unemployment, and the fact that the health of the labor market is endogenous to incarceration. We instrument for local exposure to the rise of Chinese exports (“the China Shock”) to e…
Humans in the Loop
Survey data sets are often wider than they are long. This high ratio of variables to observations raises concerns about overfitting during prediction, making informed variable selection important. Recent applications in computer science have sought to incorporate human knowledge into machine-learning methods to address these problems. The authors implement such a 'human-in-the-loop' approach in the Fragile Families Challenge. The authors use surv…
Punishment in Modern Societies
The literature on the prevalence and causes of punishment has been dominated by research into the United States. Yet most of the world's prisoners live elsewhere, and the United States is no longer the country with the world's highest incarceration rate. This article considers what we know about the prevalence and causes of incarceration around the world. We focus on three features of incarceration: its level, inequality, and severity. Existing c…
The Abject Condition of Labor in Pakistan
The strength of the trade union movement in Pakistan has ebbed and flowed over the course of the country's history, but today, after roughly twenty-five years of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, the movement is arguably at its weakest point in recent memory
The Abject Condition of Labor in Pakistan
The strength of the trade union movement in Pakistan has ebbed and flowed over the course of the country's history, but today, after roughly twenty-five years of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, the movement is arguably at its weakest point in recent memory
Democracy and the Class Struggle
Why do societies today distribute political power more equally than before? Most scholars believe that this transition is explained by the rise of capitalism but have long disagreed about why it mattered. The author argues that dominant models fail to capture why capitalist development helps key actors win what they seek. Drawing on comparative and historical work, the author introduces a model of the democratic transition that centers on the con…
The Long March
Over the last several decades, dozens of dictatorships have become democracies. Yet while each has held free and fair elections, they have varied in the extent to which their citizens realize the ideal of self-rule. Why do some democracies distribute power to citizens while other democracies withhold it? Existing research is suggestive, but its implications are ambiguous. Cross-national studies have focused on democracy’s formal dimensions, while…
Humans in the Loop
Survey data sets are often wider than they are long. This high ratio of variables to observations raises concerns about overfitting during prediction, making informed variable selection important. Recent applications in computer science have sought to incorporate human knowledge into machine-learning methods to address these problems. The authors implement such a 'human-in-the-loop' approach in the Fragile Families Challenge. The authors use surv…
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration
How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly…
Punishment in Modern Societies
The literature on the prevalence and causes of punishment has been dominated by research into the United States. Yet most of the world's prisoners live elsewhere, and the United States is no longer the country with the world's highest incarceration rate. This article considers what we know about the prevalence and causes of incarceration around the world. We focus on three features of incarceration: its level, inequality, and severity. Existing c…
Labor markets and incarceration
Studies have failed to show a positive effect of unemployment on incarceration despite reasons to expect such a relationship. We note that prior estimates have been muddied by the absence of substate data, a focus on prisons rather than on jails, limited measures of unemployment, and the fact that the health of the labor market is endogenous to incarceration. We instrument for local exposure to the rise of Chinese exports (“the China Shock”) to e…
The Currency of Racial Justice
Racial justice is widely seen as a central moral and political ideal of our time, especially on the liberal-egalitarian left. And racial justice goes hand in hand with racial equality. The centrality of these ideals would be hard to justify if they had no bearing on material or economic inequality, or applied solely to semiotic and cultural issues. But we argue that, at present, the only plausible basis for understanding racial equality as a dist…
How Segregation Ruins Inference
Why do many people underestimate economic and racial inequality and maintain that theirs is a meritocratic society? Existing work suggests that people are rationalizing, misinformed, or misled. This article proposes an additional explanation: Inequality itself makes economic and racial disparities difficult to understand. In unequal societies, individuals establish their networks at formative institutions patterned by class and race. As a result,…
The Racial Politics of Mass Incarceration
Many argue that America’s punitive turn was the result of racial backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. Yet some have noted support among black people for the policies attributed to this backlash, citing the influence of rising crime on black voters and politicians. In this article we gather new evidence and examine what it implies. Public opinion data show that not just the white but also the black public became more punitive after the 1960s. Vo…
The Libertarian Case Against Property
Economics (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Mathematics (3 works) · Computer Science (2 works) · Counterfactual thinking (2 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (2 works) · Criminology (2 works)