Is Income Mobility Socially Desirable?

In welfare economics the relevance of income mobility has been often highlighted in order to allow for the measurement of equality of opportunity. In this paper we observe that intra and intergenerational income mobility have very few in common and, in particular, only the latter concerns with equality of opportunity. In contrast with existing literature we focus on the former not the latter, as in social welfare analysis it cannot be transcended that equity and efficiency evolves in a spatio-temporal dimension. If a moral and impartial observer is assumed to be sympathetic to individual interests in a random framework, especially to the loss of individual well-being due to uncertainty, then income mobility is both source of uncertainty (ex-ante) and inequality effect (ex-post). In this context we show that income mobility does not need to be necessarily either socially neutral or socially desirable ex-ante, instead, it might be well the case that social undesirability occurs ex-ante.