Inequalities of opportunity and social mobility

This chapter examines social welfare in relation to the index of inequalities in well-being. More specifically, it considers how the classical decomposition of social welfare into average well-being and inequalities can be adapted to the social orderings that incorporate a concern for personal responsibility and for opportunities. It shows that an index of inequality of opportunity can be constructed in a similar way as one does for indexes of inequalities in well-being or income. The chapter first describes inequality indices before turning to the connection between social welfare, equality of opportunity, and social mobility. It then compares opportunity dominance with compensation and concludes by analysing the partial-circumstance problem.