Let's say you create an application which allows unemployed find jobs easier - you go to your local council, say that by deploying this app in all local job centres they can reduce unemployment by 50%. By doing so, they increase their own popularity with people, and every politician likes that.

Obviously this is just a made up example, but I am saying that there is money to be made on helping poor people,it's just not their money, because they don't have any :P

(Dis)claimer: I do real-world, boots-on-the-ground, ministers-in-government politics.

If solving poverty and unemployment was really popular, we'd have done it already. It's not, in the population. It is popular with a vocal minority of wealthy middle-class people who occasionally vote.

If you go to voters with a plan for this stuff and start knocking on random doors, I can tell you what you'll find because we find it all the time: "Where are they going to live? Not near me I hope."

I wish I could fix this, but we have to run the campaigns that people will vote for. That's democracy, and in our democracy, people are far more interested in voting against things they don't like than in voting for ideas to make society better.

The political benefit politicians get out of buying something is much lower than creating their own program.

According to previous thread, paid positions in the board of the contractor company.