> Add up all their book fees and speaking fees that they’ll never have to repay back. They can already retire comfortably.
Don't forget their faculty salaries. Duke is a private institution, so we don't have access to his salary, but absolute minimum Ariely makes 400K (and probably way more). You don't leave MIT for a chaired professorship at Duke unless it comes with a very, very hefty salary. 25 years of a salary like that will by itself provide you with a good retirement. You don't need to get the media attention of Ariely to benefit from fraud.
Not to mention the hefty consulting fees he’s been getting for years from places like Google. IMO those probably dwarf his faculty salary and money from books.
Salaries in academia are hardly a strong incentive. It's been a long time since a professor salary would put you anywhere near the top of the middle class. Especially if one considers the time and risk that you spend at lower rungs of the academic ladder. Typical professor salaries are in the mid 100ks, and you only get to that point after a PhD and several years as postdoc working 60+ hours a week for maybe $45k.
If your main incentive is financial you would be much better off to go into industry, a starting salary straight out of undergrad I a consulting or software development role is on the same level as a professor salary.
The incentive is that the salary for a tenured professor is a sinecure. At that point you can just produce bullshit and maybe cash in on speaking fees and publishing. Source: TFA. But that's loserthink.
The freedom to fuck around and (probably) never find out is considerable. And if you're actually inclined to apply yourself that 100-150k a year plus your grad students basically means you're your own y combinator year after year every year. Tenure is HUGE. It's worth way more than the equivalent salary in industry.
That's not really relevant. Ariely was an economics professor in the business school at MIT. He then got an offer as a chaired professor at Duke (certainly with a big raise). Economics professors at top schools have very high salaries relative to most fields, but chaired professors with big media profiles get way more than that.
If you want to see what I'm talking about, here's the data for the first full professor of economics at Michigan that popped into my head. His salary last year was $466K:
Don't forget their faculty salaries. Duke is a private institution, so we don't have access to his salary, but absolute minimum Ariely makes 400K (and probably way more). You don't leave MIT for a chaired professorship at Duke unless it comes with a very, very hefty salary. 25 years of a salary like that will by itself provide you with a good retirement. You don't need to get the media attention of Ariely to benefit from fraud.