So many insightful comments, I don't know this adds much but "basic cost of living" or "living reasonably" has gone up fairly exponentially in the last 10-15 ye

So many insightful comments, I don't know this adds much but "basic cost of living" or "living reasonably" has gone up fairly exponentially in the last 10-15 years. Most people in academia, if they were on the fence at all about going to industry, are probably jumping. In some not so distant past a family could live on a single-income, one person is an associate professor at a university type arrangement. These days without dual-incomes it's anomalous if you can even afford to buy a home. It's a circular problem too because the recent waves of "tech boom" + after-shocks from CV19 and associated economic "policy" the slope has become even steeper. It doesn't help that modern academia, if it was really ever different, at the graduate, post-graduate and doctoral level is basically indentured servitude. There's a reason why most graduate programs are filled with "foreigners", it's no different than H1B abuse in the tech industry -- unversities know they can abuse this work force for peanuts. So if you just finished your PhD after doing 70-80 hr weeks for the past 4-6 years and you have choice A) Continue the same and hope you can get a crack at your own research team B) Get a job, work ~10hrs/day and afford to buy new clothes, a decent car, eat well and not live in a shack, you'd likely pick choice 'B'.