is it though, compared to malware ? Consider an elderly person who gets infected with malware/spyware, making his user experience frustrating and confusing. 2 or 3 trips to the Geek Squad for $150 a visit and you're at the same financial loss as paying a ransom. I'm sure there are also people who just dont use their computers due to infections.
Plus, malware has got to be much more prevalent, at least for a long time it was, not sure what the state of it is now. So in total, I would wager that many more dollars have been spent for techs to remove it than have been spent on ransomware.
It's pretty hard to say that users "should be safe from this" - most of the solid solutions discussed in this thread are probably used by <5% of people, and maybe much less than that.
I'm extremely skeptical of the people that say ransomware is good for the economy or whatever. Broken window fallacy. Sure it creates an incentive to protect against hackers. But isn't that a bit circular? Hackers are good because they create inventive to protect against hackers? Ransomware is by far the most economically damaging kind (and personally damaging, for all the people that lose their family photos...)
Theres a lot of blame to go around for this situation. Shitty anti virus companies that sell a false sense of security and barely work. The broken security model of windows and most software. How inconvenient and expensive it is to actually do backups, so because of most basic human psychology most people put it off... If they are even technically minded enough to know they should, and most people aren't. Programs that pollute my home folder and documents with garbage that increases the space necessary to backup (OK that's just my personal issue.)