I’ve seen an fascinating paper (sorry, lost the url) that expanded on this using game theory: it’s common for “economic stratification” to have on the order of ten to fifteen levels, from abject poverty up to hundred-billionaires.

Look at it this way: there are five orders of magnitude between a “mere” ten-millionaire and the likes of Elon or Bezos!

To most people that’s the “same” level of rich, but each factor of ten is dramatically richer!

However, signals like “purposefully disheveled” and “well manicured” are essentially binary, so… they’re alternated. Each strata layer of factor of ten indicates this by flipping whatever the layer is doing below them. They won’t be confused with “two layers down” because that’s such a gulf that nobody will misunderstand.