These three visualizations quantify the Great Re-Sorting: a generational shift where pathways to top-5% income have narrowed by profession, concentrated geographically, and diverged by metro dynamism. The data reveals structural changes in how prosperity is distributed and who gets access to it.
Legal Profession Collapse: Lawyers saw the steepest decline in top-5% attainment, from 32% (boomers) to 22% (millennials)—a 10-percentage-point drop reflecting law school oversupply and commoditization of legal services.
Tech/Finance Convergence: Computer/mathematical and financial specialist fields show minimal generational change (12-14%), but now represent a larger share of total top earners as other professions declined.
Healthcare Inversion: Healthcare practitioners dropped from 15% to 12% reaching top-5%, while the profession’s overall size grew—meaning more doctors but relatively fewer rich ones.
Geographic Bifurcation
Midwest collapsed from 19% to 15% of top earners. West and South each rose to 31%, as Sun Belt and tech corridors now dominate high-income geography.
Metro Divergence Acceleration
San Francisco median earnings rose 48.6% (1990-2023 inflation-adjusted) to $67K. Mid-range metros like Buffalo, Jacksonville, and Columbus barely moved, clustering around $43-46K.
The Multiplicative Filter
Profession, geography, and metro selection now function as multiplicative filters rather than independent variables. A millennial lawyer in Buffalo faces fundamentally different odds than a software engineer in San Francisco—not marginally different, but categorically different.
The second-order effect: two Americas with increasingly non-overlapping pathways to prosperity.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
