At first I thought it was really smart, because I think people's gut negative reaction to income inequality has to do with how much people "deserve" their outcomes in life. As in, "It's not fair that he's poor! He's worked hard his whole life." or "It's not fair that he has so much more money than I do. Everything's always been handed to him on a silver platter." And at its heart, discussions about social mobility are about people "getting what they deserve." if you work hard, you get rich. If you don't, you won't.
and so a line like:
I would prefer to live in a world where the children of Bill Gates, and an average welfare mother, have the same opportunity to succeed.
sounds appealing.
Then one of the commenters made me think again.
The thing is, with the possible exception of Warren Buffett, I think one of the reasons you work to become rich is so you can provide for your family/make life easier for subsequent generations. Beyond just making money, a lot of how parents with the necessary means spend money (buying houses in good school districts, enrolling kids in enrichment programs, etc.) is aimed at giving kids an advantage in life. We might be for equality of opportunity as a general principle, but on a micro level, we want to have more opportunity than others.
I think this becomes even more clear when you realize that "equality of opportunity" or "social mobility" means opportunity to succeed -or- fail, to move up -or- down in class. And the thing is, there will be successes and failures. Unless you actually expect an efficient economy where everyone makes the same amount of money, there will be some "winners" at the top of the income distribution and some "losers" at the bottom. This is mitigated by the fact that potentially even the "losers" could be quite well off, but what it comes down to is this: no one wants his kid to be worse off than he is. With actual equality of opportunity, that would happen.
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