wiriting a 300 page book is not difficult if have sitzfleisch. only a rich society can afford the luxury of $90000+ professors. people in the foreign section of the government might be interested in a book on counter insurgency in latin america. difficult to write it is not. making it useful to anyone might be a challenge.
If someone is a happy minded satisfied easily kind of a person, seeking more to read and research lightly then there is no better job than being a tenured college professor. In the days of intenet, doing research has become 10 times more easy and spend extra $100/month (ofcourse on department's tab) you have access to several big librarys and their online material. It does however take some time to get a Phd although some folks do it in a combo program after Bachelor's where Master and Phd can be completed in 4 years total.
Well, in order to write a coherent book on the subject, you first should try to read as much as possible on the subject. Just covering Cuba will take you 6 months of intensive reading and note taking. Then you have Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, El Salvador and it's civil war, the genocide in Guatemala. Then you move to Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and so on. Now, remember, when you write your little college paper, nobody except your professor reads it. Unless it is really silly, then it may circulate around for a while and provide few laughs. (I once got a paper where a young lady claimed that Gandhi was North Korean, that was worth a few laughs). However, when you write a serious book, you better have your shit together or you will be pointed at, on the next conference by your colleagues. You are right: "only a rich society can afford the luxury of $90000+ professors." However, if that society wants to stay rich (and please do not forget that by rich I do mean other things that do not represent monetary value), that they better have plenty of professors who make enough $$$$$ so that they do not have to preoccupy themselves with making the ends meet, but strive to contribute to the wealth of our society (where wealth once again does not mean material things). A book like the one we are discussing here may not be of use to you. However, I assure you there are those who find it fascinating and interesting. They are not necessarily people who roam in your circle of friends, but they do exist.
Obvious, i am wondering if you are giving us your opinion based on personal experience, but not as "...an auto worker, or any other worker."
Every now and then these "idiot" Ph.D's happen to come up with something almost as useful as a car. Things such as the transistor, the laser, integrated circuits, super conductors, nuclear magnetic resonance (which your local hospital could use, CAPTAINOBVIOUS, to image the empty space between your ears) computers, the genetic code, fission reactors, synthetic steroids, polymers (useless stuff like nylon, neoprene, teflon, mylar, kevlar, acrylates, polycarbonates, and siloxanes), communication satellites, option pricing formulas, freon, rockets, spacecraft, airplanes, led displays, color television, adhesives, mass spectromters, the human genome sequence, and of coarse "Bucky Balls." Sorry if i left a few hundred thousand incidental accomplishments of these "jerk-offs" off the list, you imbecile. How these "idiot" Ph.D.'s managed to do this stuff while busy running Scantrons, jerking off, and falling off logs, remains a mystery.
It is illogical to assume most these technologies you have mentioned came out of universities or the personnel that work there, including professors ... technologies are a result of real team work, plus high pays for serious and smart people specially during war times ... the core knowledge of these tools; cars, planes, laptops, cellphone, satellites, medicine and much more are all the result of some war, some time in human history ... or if not a war, military research ... and not university research ... all university people do is go through declassified data from the military and other intelligence and rewrite them in their own so called professional style ... making universities so attractive to the dorks ... what is your level of education? ... what fields have you studied? ... open any university book and read it ... whatever ... it could be a graduate level mechanical engineering book ... if you can understand what it says, you will know that most of it is just non-sense .. or repeated sentences using different words ... just waste of time and paper to make a book that has not more than 10 pages of info look like 100 pages of knowledge and wisdom ... that is what sucks about universities ... they waste your time and money ... universities are supposed to be places where people learn .. not where people waste their time and money doing repetitive non-sense homework in other words universities are only 1-10% efficient the rest is just shit ... a company with only 30% efficiency could die rapidly ... but i am surprised that universities continue to live i must admit that even though they are not fully helpful in finding a job ... they are 10-30% efficient in that ... they kinda secure your future ... that is all there is to universities a paper that says you wasted 4-5 years of your life, without feeling bad about it ... resisted no income ... lived on loans ... jumped into sex groups with all kinds of fags and ugly sluts... went high all night ... and were able to resist without giving up, till you got the degree ... now you are ready to serve your boss ... get the picture? why the fuck do you think professors are so full of sick desires?!
You got some serious issues pal. Seek help and stop posting before you utterly embarrass yourself. Than again it may be too late. University is not there to only prepare you for a job. It should also make/shape you into a renaissance man. Have you ever seen Frasier? He is a perfect albeit fictional example of a renaissance man.
A friend of mine gave me some advice one time about comparing salaries/wages of different people/positions. "I don't care what anybody else makes. All I care is what I make." If an autoworker makes "X", so what? If a professor makes "X", so what? If a pro athlete makes "X", so what? If a CEO makes "X", so what? Good for them. If you are unhappy with that there really isn't a lot you can do about now is there? If you are unhappy with what you make there is something you can do about that.