Brain drain

Monday, 2022-9-26: Word of the Day: Brain drain
For many highly educated or skilled people, their education is a golden ticket to anywhere they want to go.

YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast

Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.



WotD: Brain drain

We’re living through a period of high inflation and are watching our hard-earned cash go down the drain as prices rise higher and higher.

If this continues for much longer, many areas will begin to experience a brain drain.


A brain drain occurs when many educated or highly skilled people leave one area or country to live and work in another for better pay and conditions. 


We are already seeing this happening in the medical field in many Western countries.

Doctors and nurses burnt out after the COVID-19 pandemic are leaving their jobs for greener pastures.

This could mean leaving Canada to work in Florida for better pay and gentle winters.

Or it could mean a doctor leaves a hospital, moves to a countryside location and provides online consultations instead.  

Here in Japan, there has been an ongoing brain drain from the countryside to Tokyo.

Personally, I don’t see the appeal of Tokyo.

I’ve lived in Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland and Osaka.

If you’ve visited one big city, you’ve seen them all.

They can be exciting at first, but eventually, the excitement of the hustle and bustle will wear off.

Then there’s the shock of high prices.

Sure, you earn more in the city, but you spend more, too.

An interesting point to note is that even though average salaries in Japan are much lower than those overseas, Japan has not experienced a brain drain to foreign countries.

I suppose that’s because English is not a strong suit for many young Japanese.

Tokyo is as good as it gets for them. 


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test 

This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).   

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 67.   

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.