复老妙答。以下是我对这个PARADOX的想法

1. Most human judgments are relative, i.e., based on comparisons to certain reference points.

2. People socialize and form social circles/networks within their respective classes/strata. They tend to use members of their own networks as references when evaluating their financial situations.

3. The variance of income/wealth for the poor people's networks is much smaller than that for rich people's networks. This is in general true, given that virtually all societies' income/wealth distributions are heavily skewed. Hence, rich people are more likely to have immediate exposure to people who are a lot richer than themselves.

4. Poor people often do not know how wealthy the rich folks are; even when they do find out from sources like the Forbes, the information is not going to be weighed as much as his next door neighbor getting a new Ford truck.

These are some of my preliminary thoughts. Comments and suggestions welcome.

On a side note, in the US, kids from working class families are surprisingly ignorant of how much the rich folks make. I once asked some college students from a blue-collar town to estimate the average annual income of the CEOs of the Dow Jones companies, many of them guessed around $150K. The actual figure is over $10M.