It's definitely a political problem more than any other, yes. What would give politicians more incentive to operate this way would be real campaign finance reform. Check out represent.us

I would argue that its an engineering/technology problem at heart. If access to those things was easy and cheap politicians would have no/less incentive to hold it back. It's probably not the same if it's a limited and restricted resource.

If we had more people trying to optimize food production, water distribution, Healthcare scaling and management etc, those things would become materially better, fast.

But we are more concerned with optimizing ads so we can buy shit we don't need so..

Underlying the political will to do something would be the implementation of that thing. To continue the running water example, you can imagine many technical challenges to distributing fresh water to the parts of the world that don’t already have it.

This undoubtedly needs talented engineers across the disciplines, definitely not just software.