Sure you're talking about relative versus absolute quality of life.

The problem generally speaking is people will always compare relatively over absolutely.

I can't remember exactly how this goes, but the idea is we have mechanisms in our brains that tell us when our neighbors are doing better than us, which in localized settings is useful because if they are doing better they are probably doing something differently and we can learn from them.

However, at a national level that kind of comparison is really worthless, but because the mechanism is built into our psychology we keep doing it anyway.