I am going to say something that will irritate a great many academics, which is usually how one knows the sentence has some value.

I work roughly fifty to sixty hours a week doing commercial research. On top of that, I do university research. This year I will probably publish around twelve journal papers and more conference papers besides. Not all of that work was begun this year, of course. Research has a pipeline, and anyone who has actually maintained one knows that publication is merely the visible end of work done months or years before.

I am also willing, when necessary, to work eighty, ninety, even a hundred hours a week.

That has costs.

Everything worth having has costs. The modern habit is to speak endlessly about the price of achievement while remaining curiously silent about the price of avoiding it.

As I write this, I am sitting on my beachfront property, watching the ridiculous cats my wife has adopted locally wander about as if they had personally financed the place. I am perfectly aware that the hours, the travel, the research, the writing and the relentless accumulation of work have extracted their price.

I am equally certain that it was worth paying.

This is where academics lose me when they complain endlessly about money.

If you want more income, you generally have to produce more value.

Academia gives you something extraordinarily valuable: expertise. It also frequently gives you forms of time and intellectual freedom that people working ordinary commercial jobs simply do not possess. Sabbaticals exist. University holidays exist. Research time exists. Libraries, conferences, institutional networks and access to knowledge exist.

Use them.

People buy history books.

People buy books about geography.

They buy economics, philosophy, psychology, politics, technology, science and mathematics.

They pay to hear people speak about things they understand unusually well.

They pay for consulting.

They pay for courses.

They pay for analysis.

They pay for expertise when that expertise is made useful, interesting or intelligible.

The idea that only business professors or computer scientists can monetise academic knowledge is nonsense. Human beings have been paying other human beings to explain history, ideas, places, politics, art and civilisation for centuries.

But none of this happens automatically.

You have to write the book.

You have to give the talk.

You have to build the reputation.

You have to make the argument interesting enough that someone outside your department wants to hear it.

You have to work.

And sometimes you have to work considerably more than the contractual minimum.

There is nothing immoral about wanting a better academic salary, and universities should pay good scholars properly. But there is something strange about spending decades acquiring highly specialised knowledge and then behaving as though there is only one possible purchaser for it: the university payroll department.

Your salary is not necessarily your income.

Your university is not necessarily your market.

And your discipline is not necessarily commercially useless simply because you have never discovered how to sell what you know.

If you want to earn more as an academic, then create something people value enough to pay for.

And if, after years of education, research freedom, professional networks and accumulated expertise, you still cannot find any way to turn some of that knowledge into additional income, the uncomfortable possibility remains that the problem is not academia.

It may be you.

The great advantage of education is that it teaches us how to solve difficult problems.

One would hope that earning a living eventually becomes one of them.