San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and ... Midland, Texas? The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its personal income report for 2011, naming the richest metropolitan areas in the United States by personal income per capita, and the top two spots require some explanation.

At number one, there's Bridgeport, Connecticut, one of the most unequal metropolitan areas in the country. Home to both Bridgeport, the struggling industrial city, and Greenwich, the home for hedge fund billionaires on the outskirts of New York City, the metropolitan area has the nation's highest share of income earned by the top fifth. This is case where averages tell you one thing -- there are some intensely rich people living in the Bridgeport MSA -- while the median would give you a typical household income figure closer to $30,000.

Meanwhile, it's boom times in the Permian Basin, the petroleum-rich swath of western Texas, where unemployment in Midland is 3% and one-quarter of the labor force works in mining. If Bridgeport's top spot is a statistical glitch, Midland's second-place finish is a geological one: The small city and its big wages are at the mercy of their natural resources and the globally-determined price of energy.

Further down the list, we have cities like San Francisco, San Jose, Boston, and NYC, where wages are high because productive, innovative, and well-educated people work and live there without the benefit of natural resources. There is nothing wrong, as a commenter pointed out, with mining as a profession or a means of production, and living above natural resources doesn't make you lazy. But to the extent that the future of any 21st century country will be tied to its human capital -- and since not every city can be perched above a petroleum-rich basin -- these cities seem closer to a scalable model of a thriving modern metro.