KINGS POINT, N.Y. — Adam Katz is happy to talk to reporters when he is promoting his business, a charter flight company based on Long Island called Talon Air.

But when the subject was his position as one of America’s top earners, he balked. Seated at a desk fashioned from a jet fuel cell, wearing a button-down shirt with the company logo, he considered the public relations benefits and found them lacking: “It’s not very popular to be in the 1 percent these days, is it?”

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From one vantage point, these responses may seem extreme. But there is no doubt that the troubled economy has focused anger on the fact that the rich have grown richer and the middle class, over the last decade, has lost ground. Several 1 percenters mentioned the riots in Britain and Spain; one said he kept his plane fueled up. In a recent survey, the Pew Research Center found that Americans now ranked conflict between rich and poor as stronger than timeworn clashes between immigrants and the native-born, blacks and whites, or young and old.

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