This is not necessarily true. I know many academics who have made more money than many “business people.” Yes, not the majority nor the average, and there are millions of business people who are struggling to make ends meet and/or who go bankrupt.
Some academics have turned their research into very successful businesses including consulting firms, manufacturing firms, etc. And who is to say that working with, shaping, molding the minds of young aspiring people, in my case, aspiring business people (I taught my whole career in graduate schools of business, Harvard and Virginia), is less valuable than producing and distributing electrical fixtures?
Teaching tends to be focused on groups of 20–100 at a time while selling electrical fixtures or glue or paint (pick your favorite) typically targets millions of people. IF one can find and sell something that millions need or want one can make a lot of money.
That said, I was more successful financially than I ever thought I would be by becoming an academic and then using my understanding of leadership and organizational behavior to create a worldwide consulting practice. Some academics went even farther to create worldwide consulting FIRMS, e.g. Boston Consulting Group, Bain and Company, etc.
So my answer is it depends a lot on the academic and the business person you want to compare. I’ve written cases on people who made 100 times what I have. So, if you want to make as much money as you can, business is a better bet than academics AND I hope you will think about success and life as something more than in that unilateral money-focused way. People who love what they are doing, who are good at what they love doing, and do something that other people want to pay for (Collins' Hedgehog Concept) will do just fine in life.
And then the issue will be, have you contributed more than you took? Are you a net contributor or a net extractor from society? And how will you measure that?
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