Ok so first off, rent in Tulsa is 12k at most for a full house.

Second off a lot of the high cost of living has nothing to do with solving hard problems, if it did the civil engineers would have solved the hard problem of fixing the housing market in SF. What you are essentially arguing is Tom Cruise 2.0 makes 6 million a film after a few years in the industry so therefor everyone else sucks which you can tell because they don't make 6 million. Being generous I would claim it's a survivorship bias.