+1 for social status as zero-sum game. Imagine your social status if you jumped back 2,000 years and could still conduct your current lifestyle: being able to feed yourself for a week from only a fews hours of labour; travel across the Atlantic in a 8 hours at the cost of one weeks labour; access all human knowledge in seconds at near zero cost.
It's because social status by definition is a zero-sum game. For status symbols, the absolute value is irrelevant; but what matters is the value relative to your peers.