My family are Sri Lankan (and I was born there), so I have experienced much the same as the author - Sri Lanka has a VERY high emigration rate, and even more so among the affluent. There have been genuine reasons for people to leave though (civil war, corrupt and incompetent government, a major economic crisis) and even so I think many people hugely over-estimate the gain from emigrating. Pay might be lower but so is the cost of living, and all that emigration of skilled people means that if you are skilled your skills are in demand, etc.
I grew up mostly in Britain. People here a whole lot worse. They talk as though the country is some kind of disaster and a terrible place to live. The economy is apparently a disaster (ignoring little things like low unemployment), we have a cost of living crisis caused by the country doing so badly (apparently inflation is not a problem anywhere else) and our economy is doing terrible (which it is compared to the US, and even more so compared to much of Asia - but not compared to other big European economies).
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