If you know plenty of people outside of the major tech big cities (and I should have included Austin and Seattle in that, for sure) making over $200,000 year, they you have a statistically unusual sample of friends.

All the data back up what I'm saying. Go look at the numbers. Look at salaries on monster.com or your favorite job site. Perhaps you and your friends don't realize how unusual it is (granted, you also have higher cost-of-living in those cities, sometimes by enough to eat up the additional salary).