The reason inequality is a problem is very simple.
As inequality increases at scale it means that an increasingly concentrated group has more and more capital. What do they do with that capital? They buy assets, they are basically forced to do so by design.
What happens when they buy assets? They capitalize those assets. An apartment unit now becomes a home others can rent but not purchase.
Rinse and repeat until eventually wealth is so concentrated that the ability for any other individuals to access assets is basically zero. This means those individuals cannot build capital or ultimately wealth and it also means that, even if more resource become readily available, more people cannot afford them. They have to do 2x today what they did yesterday to an achieve the same amount of stability even if their "standard of living" has increased because of a wider swath of goods and services.
Honestly at this point I think that anyone who doesn't see inequality as a major driver of contemporary problems is simply not paying attention to the USA or must not live there. Countries in which it is less of a problem basically only mitigate it by having a state that can provide essentials to effectively prevent the capitaled class from taking them away from people (eg healthcare, as you mention).
Economics is all about the balance of who has access to what resources. We cannot just generate resources and capital out of thin air. One person getting more necessarily means another gets less. Period.
lol. Like many of Scott Alexander's essays, this is bad argumentation in nice window dressing, as well as a slight apologia for racism.
There are so many problems with this essay that it's hard to know where to begin, but two major ones are that (1) his reading comprehension sucks, (2) the major flaw in his line of argument is merely hand waved away—it relies on a fundamental premise that mobility of people in the south was zero after the civil war and that the civil war destroying an entire industry would have had zero effect (this is the part he hand waves away at the end of the article after making his idiotic apology for continued racism based on one solitary citation) As usual, it's an article making people unschooled in the actual practice of rigorous academic research to buy into bad ideas .
Anyway, that's all beside the point. A specific article countering a single claim against reparations has basically very little to do with the topic at hand unless you can prove the very specific set of dynamics that is analyzed in that case (a) applies globally, and (b) still applies today.
This style of argument is equivalent to saying "look i found one rock that was purple so all rocks must be purple". It has basically no relevance as far as I'm concerned.
As inequality increases at scale it means that an increasingly concentrated group has more and more capital. What do they do with that capital? They buy assets, they are basically forced to do so by design.
What happens when they buy assets? They capitalize those assets. An apartment unit now becomes a home others can rent but not purchase.
Rinse and repeat until eventually wealth is so concentrated that the ability for any other individuals to access assets is basically zero. This means those individuals cannot build capital or ultimately wealth and it also means that, even if more resource become readily available, more people cannot afford them. They have to do 2x today what they did yesterday to an achieve the same amount of stability even if their "standard of living" has increased because of a wider swath of goods and services.
Honestly at this point I think that anyone who doesn't see inequality as a major driver of contemporary problems is simply not paying attention to the USA or must not live there. Countries in which it is less of a problem basically only mitigate it by having a state that can provide essentials to effectively prevent the capitaled class from taking them away from people (eg healthcare, as you mention).
Economics is all about the balance of who has access to what resources. We cannot just generate resources and capital out of thin air. One person getting more necessarily means another gets less. Period.