Many of these discussions seem to leave the elephant in the room of what is 'enough'. If your company can only extract 50K per employee, and a home costs 500K

Many of these discussions seem to leave the elephant in the room of what is 'enough'. If your company can only extract 50K per employee, and a home costs 500K in the region, then I don't think you have a legitimate business, and I don't think it should be surprising that people leave for pastures new. I've spent far too long trying to improve companies' profitability to the point that they can actually afford to pay my mortgage - it's looking likely that I'll be lounging on 10 hours / week for the indefinite future. Burn my youth so I can rent a fancy apartment? No thanks!