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Computational power and big data have created new opportunities to explore and understand the social world. A special synergy is possible when social scientists combine human attention to certain aspects of the problem with the power of algorithms to automate other aspects of the problem. We review selected exemplary applications where machine learning amplifies researcher coding, summarizes complex data, relaxes statistical assumptions, and targets researcher attention to further social science research. We aim to reduce perceived barriers to machine learning by summarizing several fundamental building blocks and their grounding in classical statistics. We present a few guiding principles and promising approaches where we see particular potential for machine learning to transform social science inquiry. We conclude that machine learning tools are increasingly accessible, worthy of attention, and ready to yield new discoveries for social research. 

Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g., incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g., access to college). Drawing on causal decomposition analyses, this type of research question yields several benefits. First, gap-closing estimands place categories like race in a causal framework without making them play the role of the treatment (which is philosophically fraught for non-manipulable variables). Second, gap-closing estimands empower researchers to study disparities using new statistical and machine learning estimators designed for causal effects. Third, gap-closing estimands can directly inform policy: if we sampled from the population and actually changed treatment assignments, how much could we close gaps in outcomes? I provide open-source software (the R package gapclosing) to support these methods.