It makes sense one might think it would go this way, but I think in practice it actually tends to discourage materialism.

I look at the culture in the US vs. Japan. Probably because of differences in population densities more than anything else, US culture tends to encourage buying a lot of cheap (well, more accurately: cost efficient) stuff, whereas Japanese culture tends to encourage buying fewer things, but for those things to be as close to ideal as possible. [I am speaking in generalizations here, as per usual, the variance within cultures is greater than the difference across cultures, so please, let's not argue about THAT.]

While I've found pride of ownership in both cultures, the likelihood one will be defined by ownership seems to be much higher in US culture.