"It's absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty"
seems empirically not to be true; see all the medical research about the health hazards of relative poverty, eg: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/health-care-for-all/1509
not to mention Veblen.
It would be better and simpler if people only cared about absolute wealth, but to quote some essay I read recently, "of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that."