I don't think you understand how poor the poorest man on Earth today is, nor how ineffective that wealth would be for gaining influence in other cultures.
Maybe I got carried away. Maybe not the poorest, but a very poor man today has resources at his disposal (via modern societies, no matter how poor) vastly greater than the resources a very rich man could get millenia ago. He can be cured of various deseases, can move around with incredible vehicles, can talk with people very far away from him, has incredible amount of knowledge at his disposal, and already knows things (“the Earth is round“) which are very valuable (as in “we invested huge amounts of resources to get to know this“). His power is enormous.
Human nature is such that we feel poor because we only have a bike, while our neighbor has a Porsche, without realizing that a bike is an incredible thing.
For a remote Afghan, or even a rural Cambodian, life is pretty much the same as it has been for thousands of years. The wealth and means exist to feed and clothe and shelter all humans on earth, but those who actually have means at their disposal choose instead to spend the money on wars and opulence.
Plenty of Middle-class Americans deny that the earth is round, even with all the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.
Potentially, yes, the world is miraculous compared to the past. But for those who are not born into some of that gradual wealth creation (as most Westerners were), they are still very poor and very exploited. Or they are too remote to bother with and so life is hardly any different compared with 100 or 500 years ago.
We are talking about different things: you talk about somebody alive today, but basically living in the past. His peers are those in times past, so he is as rich or poor as they were.
I talk about your average “very poor guy“ in a modern society: he is just poor compared to his peers, but rich compared to a lot of people.
But no matter who we are talking about: my point all along is that being poor or rich is a relative measure. To say that a person is poor, you need to state “compared to“. Usually we implicitely compare to the “average contemporary citizen“
Human nature is such that we feel poor because we only have a bike, while our neighbor has a Porsche, without realizing that a bike is an incredible thing.