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'.
Has the cost gone up, or have expectations? None of my friends paid for subscriotions for anything but a landline, cooked moat of their food, and wore years old clothes a couple decades ago. People consume at a much faster rate today.
This might be a US-centric experience so I'm prefacing...
Basic cost of living is : rent, food, utilities. Those three have gone up astronomically, especially in the past 3-years.
A graduate stipend is probably $22K/year, maybe more for a PhD student. 20-years ago that was reasonable, if rent is $1700/mo you're already underwater given you have to pay taxes on that meager $22K.
In my graduate experience, I didn't see most grad students walking around with the latest cell phones, laptops or luxury goods, they struggled with the basics.
A number of graduate students at various universities are going on strike and forming unions and honestly more power to them:
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'.