The profiteers are the lottery mechanism manufacturers. The people who make the tickets, the machines, etc. State run lotteries are TERRIBLE across the board and are the natural result of money in politics. Some group gets together enough money, they can push the public to accept a policy that profits the group indefinitely while marginally changing the lives of the public (usually for the worse, with noise and misinformation).
The problem with current approaches is that they’re trying to educate adults, and adults are stubborn and busy and already addicted to whatever they’re addicted to.
My hypothetical would make stats (including game-theory) part of the required high-school curriculum, where the lottery commission pays all the public stats teachers a comfortable salary. Teach kids about why lotteries are a bad deal for them before they ever play one.
A course in X being required doesn't translate into most people retaining a useful level of skill in X, at least not in the US -- there were some eye-opening stats about this in Caplan's The Case Against Education. I think it jibes with the memories most of us have about high school, too. I'm not saying this problem can't be fixed, but it's upstream of funding and curriculum.
For statistics classes in particular, the overwhelmingly common failure mode is:
1. Students learn how to apply some formulas to specific types of problems. If you ask them to find the population standard deviation of heights from a sample of 10 people, they can plug those numbers into their calculators and come up with the answer.
2. Except for maybe 10% of the class, they never really develop any deeper understanding. It's all surface level, "figure out which kind of problem this is then use the formula" stuff.
3. All this knowledge is forgotten very quickly once the grim specter of exams is gone.
4. Congratulations! "Education" has happened!
The situation is less grim if e.g. you're teaching college students majoring in math or engineering, but would be worse if you tried pushing stats classes on a less selected group like the general high schooler population.
