Would 5m be enough to give up work? A report in the New York Times this week said that most of the millionaires in Silicon Valley keep on slaving 70 hours a week because they don't feel wealthy enough.

Hal Steger, who is worth $3.5m, was quoted as saying "a few million doesn't go as far as it used to". Gary Kremen, the founder of Match. com who has $10m, said "you're nobody here at $10m".

Umberto Milletti, founder of an online learning company who was worth $50m before the dotcom bubble burst but is worth only $5m now, heaven help him, said: "Here, the top 1% chases the top one-tenth of 1%, and the top one-tenth of 1% chases the top one-hundredth of 1%. You try not to get caught up in it, but it's hard not to."

The problem is they're surrounded by people who are 10 or 100 times richer, and they lose all sense of proportion.

Could this offer a clue as to why Irish consumer confidence was reported this week to be at its lowest in four years?

The latest consumer sentiment index from the ESRI and IIB, conducted by means of a telephone survey of 800 people . . . and wouldn't you love to know who they are? . . .revealed that people (sorry, consumers) are feeling more down in the dumps about their financial situation than they have since October 2003.

"The mood of consumers seems to have been shaped by several high-profile forecasts, encompassing a notable weakening in economic growth and the risk of widespread job losses in the construction sector, " said IIB chief economist Austin Hughes.

But no one seems to be forecasting an economic catastrophe. The Central Bank expects the economy to grow by 5% this year. So . . . without wanting to sound like Bertie Ahern here . . . what are these 800 people feeling so wretched about? Are they cheesed off not because they're getting poorer, but because others are getting richer?

At the same time, while consumer confidence has been falling, Hughes pointed out that retail spending in Ireland (sorry, in the Irish market) was up 7.5%. So people (sorry, consumers) keep on spending, while fretting about what they've got in their pockets? It doesn't make sense, unless they're trying to buy their way out of what Alain de Botton has memorably called 'Status Anxiety'.

Meanwhile, on Friday it was reported that a study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) had revealed that China has one of the largest gaps between rich and poor in Asia.

That's where rule by free market gets you, of course. But the ADB research also found that, while China's income distribution is more unequal than in India, for example, the bottom 20% of earners in China are still better off than the bottom 20% in India.

"It is not so much a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor, " Ifzal Ali, the ADB's chief economist, told a press conference in Beijing.

This is all quite funny really, from the point of view of anthropological whimsy, if you can set aside your humanitarian misgivings for a moment. Does anyone feel a Desmond Morris moment coming on? Measurements of relative poverty are all very well, after all, but envy must come into it somewhere.

It starts with resenting your neighbour's sandals when you yourself are barefoot, and continues up through despising your Nissan because the damn Joneses have a Lexus (though it has to be said, it also applies to people who have good taste in cars). It is not enough merely to be doing well; you have to be doing better than someone else.

We laugh when the term relative poverty is used about rich people (sorry, high networth individuals) and wring our hands when it's used about poor people, but when we start speaking seriously about relative poverty among people who can afford to feed, clothe and educate themselves, we must be doing a disservice to those who can't.

The humanitarian misgivings are back.