There are about a dozen industries at the frontier of innovation. They include software and pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and data processing. Most of their workers have science or tech degrees. They invest heavily in research and development. While they account for only 3 percent of all jobs, they account for 6 percent of the country’s economic output.

And if you don’t live in one of a handful of urban areas along the coasts, you are unlikely to get a job in one of them.

Boston, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco and Silicon Valley captured nine out of 10 jobs created in these industries from 2005 to 2017, according to a report released on Monday. By 2017, these five metropolitan regions had accumulated almost a quarter of these jobs, up from under 18 percent a dozen years earlier. On the other end, about half of America’s 382 metro areas — including big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia — lost such jobs.

And the concentration of prosperity does not appear to be slowing down.

America’s deepening inequality has become a cause for alarm. The picture of a country cloven between a small set of prosperous urban “haves” and a large collection of “have-nots” has come sharply into focus as an opioid epidemic has overtaken vast swaths of the country. It gained the attention of the political class in 2016, when voters across the industrial heartland embraced Donald J. Trump’s populist message.