But if we relax licensing for a particular sector, that will most likely create some wealthy people, and also some business losers, and it is quite possible that measured income inequality will rise. That may not register as a net gain according to the formal metrics of the egalitarian, but there is more opportunity, and greater liberty to earn a living as one sees fit. The inequality focus tends to draw us to redistribution, whereas a mobility focus is more conducive to ideas for wealth creation.

The issue of immigration also looks different when considering these two perspectives. Letting more immigrants reside legally in the United States will help the immigrants and perhaps help many wealthy Americans who can hire them to work for their companies or perhaps to perform personal services for them at home. Those same immigrants may not help the American middle or lower middle classes, since the best evidence suggests those effects are very close to neutral. Someone focused on equality may be lukewarm about such a change, which may raise measured inequality, but a mobility advocate will embrace it, because it makes the immigrants as a group much better off.

In personal discussions, I’ve found that egalitarians often retreat to pro-mobility intuitions when confronted by such examples, because who wants to oppose greater opportunity? Still, the key is to be consistent, and that means acknowledging that widely used gauges of economic inequality, like the Gini coefficient, aren’t well suited for measuring social and economic progress. That metric and similar ones don’t focus our attention on what is actually unfair about the status quo: the absolute deprivation and lack of opportunity imposed on too many people.

Emphasizing mobility also suggests a less bleak perspective on the recent course of American history. While it’s sadly true that productivity and income growth have lagged since the 1970s, to the extent that we’re concerned primarily with relative progress through the income ranks, the best research suggests that income mobility in America has been flat for at least 20 years. Upward mobility hasn’t increased, but at least it hasn’t declined.

Furthermore, actual mobility has been much more robust than the numbers indicate. The statistics do not count the gains of people who have come from another country for a new and higher salary in the United States. The percentage of foreign-born Americans has been rising for decades and that suggests significant unmeasured mobility gains.

It is quite possible the future will bring higher levels of income inequality, which will undoubtedly distress many commentators. But we are likely to be better off if we keep our eye on the ball, identify what really helps people the most and do whatever we can to increase economic mobility. That is a practical program that we all should be able to endorse.