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Also depressing are some of the corollaries that have cropped up. "On average, you are surrounded by people who are more successful than you." "On average, your (sexual) partners have more partners than you."

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>"On average, you are surrounded by people who are more successful than you."

How does this one work? It doesn't seem to fit. I'm more likely to be friends with friendly people, more likely to have sex with people who like to have sex, why am I more likely to be around successful people?

Successful people have more friends than average.

That may well be true, but it isn't really relevant to the paradox. That's a second-order effect which needs to be established statistically, not the paradox itself which is pure graph theory. You're basically saying "You're more likely to be friends with people who make a lot of friends - that is an emergent property of a network. Also, I believe friendliness is correlated with success."

This was actually how I first heard of the friendship paradox. There were a number of articles related to this earlier this year; here [0] is one and the original article [1]. Sorry for not linking earlier.

[0] http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523566/how-the-friendsh...

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1458

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