When being rich isn't enough

It's hard to feel special, even when you're a millionaire, when hedge fund royalty like Steve Schwarzman throw themselves $3 million birthday parties:

The desire to avoid such relative deprivation drives consumption in a range of goods, especially those that Frank calls “positional goods” — things like housing and cars, in which differences in quality and size are readily visible. In buying bigger homes, faster computers and more powerful backyard grills, people are driven by the desire to be a part of a community and to keep up with the Joneses. If you happen to live on Park Avenue, it means buying a Monet and a 10,000-square-foot co-op to keep up with the Schwarzmans. Like politics, all relative deprivation is local.

In a review of two books by economist Robert H. Frank, Daniel Gross explains how our relative level of possessions, rather than our absolute wealth, drives our consumption habits.
This jibes with Matthew Yglesias's frequent observation that increasing inequality at the top distorts everyone's view of wealth:

...the new era of hyper-inequality, where not only does the top one percent pulls away from the other 99 percent, but the top 0.001 percent pulls away from the other 99.999 percent. Even very rich people feel the even richer pulling further and further away and don't feel themselves to be as privileged as, objectively speaking, they really are.