[fyi80]

People can work as much or as little as they want, once they make tenure. It's not that different from the startup model: hard work for a few years up front, then cash in your chips, with 2-3 decades of guaranteed income until government retirement age.

[tellarin]

This would only be the case if every research job was in a university and in tenure track, which is definitely not the case.

Many research positions are in industry, or are postdocs or non-tenure track. Besides the fact that many countries don't have anything similar to tenure.

Also, not everybody on tenure track reaches it.