I don't quite agree with you on politics be damned. One of the points that Tim Worstall has made in several of his articles is that not only are we in the developed world immensely rich, by both relative and historical standards. But also that globalisation has made a few billion people also immensely rich by relative and historical standards.
I think this is an important thing to chuck into the current political debate. There's various arguments on when it happened, but wage growth for the ordinary working person has recently stalled. I don't think it's a new permanent thing, but you could argue that it kicked in sometime in the middle of the last boom. Or there's an argument, for the US/UK, that purchasing power growth petered out some time in the 90s because of rocketing housing costs (more the UK), and soaring healthcare costs in the States.
Globalisation has chucked an awful lot of money into the Chinese economy in particular, also the rest of Asia, South America and quite a lot of African economies have been doing pretty well too. Much better than was previously thought, now that people have gone back and looked properly (partly becasue governments in Africa weren't spending enough money on their statistical offices).
So one thing that this might be telling us is that aid is less useful than trade. Which then leads to another political discussion. We've increased the global workforce, and therefore outsourced quite a lot of jobs, and that's made a lot of our stuff cheaper. Although has also hit wages. This has happened with industry and services. But we're still protecting our agricultural sectors, with lots of subsidies, tariffs and trade barriers. Even though agriculture is likely to be a way that the very poorest can get a chance of starting to improve their lives.
So how many more people's lives in the developing world could we improve if we traded fairly with them in agriculture too? In the EU we use the Common Agricultural Policy to increase the food prices to our consumers in order to enrich our farmers (and impoverish farmers in Africa). If we feel we need to protect our rural economies, might it not be better to have fair trade, drop the tariffs and therefore our food prices. And then use taxation to deal with the rural issues. Theoretically it should be possible to make almost everyone better off, and nobody worse off, if done right.