AFTER a three-year absence because of a moribund economy, the ritual announcement of Wall Street's year-end bonuses was on display again this year. How the billions in bonus money was spread around made front-page news last week in New York, where the tabloids used the phrase "eye popping" to describe the amounts being dispensed. The man of the hour was Philip J. Purcell, chairman and chief executive of Morgan Stanley, who raked in $12 million.

The bonus parade coincided with reports of packed restaurants and airline flights. "This economy of ours is strong, and it is getting stronger," President Bush said.

But at the Labor Ready day-labor center in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn , Daniel J. Levens was experiencing the same economic revival in a somewhat less pronounced fashion.

"I just don't see a big difference right now," said Mr. Levens, a manager who matches workers with short-term hauling and building jobs. "It's not worse. It's not better. It's just the same."

Dave Rick, 39, who was laid off from a printing company just before Thanksgiving, was more dour. "It doesn't feel good," Mr. Rick said. "After eight years, I got three months' severance. I'm sweating my mortgage, trying to keep the fear at low tide."

Why this disparity between Wall Street, where the betting is that another boom is beginning, and the experience of the rest of the country? It seems to occur at the beginning of every upswing in the business cycle, economists point out, because the American economy, for good or ill, is led by its financial markets.

"The fact that Wall Street bonuses are rising and Joe Schmo's wages are not rising doesn't mean that's a permanent state of affairs," said Ian Shepherdson, North American analyst at High Frequency Economics, a consulting firm in Valhalla , N.Y.

Job losses, in this view, are the inevitable result of changes in our innovative, self-renewing economy. Yes, many jobs in many industries are disappearing. But the American economy is geared toward producing new jobs in new industries, powered by new investment.

As the engine of that investment, Wall Street regularly booms and busts in advance of the rest of the country. The market took a big fall in October 1987, for example, and it was nearly three years before the national economy began to contract.

"The people in the middle are stagnating in terms of their earnings, the people at the top are gaining ground and the people at the bottom are losing," said Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell.

One reason for this unequal result, said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a liberal research group, is that workers have lost bargaining power as growth and productivity have remained strong while employment faltered.

"Essentially there's a line outside the factory door, and by the way, it's not just the factory door, it's the office door and the software designer door," Mr. Bernstein said. "There's no incentive to bid wages up."

This is revealed in figures from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, indicating that corporate profits were substantially up for 2002, while personal income fell.

This does not mean that, eventually, a rising tide on Wall Street won't lift all the boats on Main Street -- or that those boats won't stay afloat for a while even after Wall Street runs dry. For example, though the Nasdaq began to fall from its peak in March 2000, unemployment, then at only 4 percent, did not begin to rise significantly for almost a year.

Besides, Americans have historically accepted the idea of the self-made individual and its economic corollary: that the biggest risk-takers should get the biggest rewards.

"There's a great deal of mobility," said Bruce Bartlett, an economist who worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. "People do move up and down the income ladder with great regularity."

Trade is another factor in widening the gap, and not merely in terms of jobs lost to low-wage overseas economies. When businesses in the United States engage with foreign companies that pay a fraction of their wages, the dollars that are sent overseas return as investments in stock and bond markets in the United States , said James Grant, the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.

"That money ends up back here, which is good for Morgan Stanley, it's good for Goldman Sachs, it causes the pictures of their C.E.O.'s to end up on the front page of The Daily News," Mr. Grant said. "Meantime, people just as photogenic are left out of a job."

Liberal researchers say that this growing inequality is a result of free-market policies that favor the so-called invisible hand of competition, forgoing regulations and wage minimums and discouraging unions.

Conservative researchers say that the counterexample is the European job market, where wages are kept steady and dismissing employees is difficult and where unemployment rates have generally been higher, sometimes much higher, than in the United States in recent decades. It is unclear, in the end, whether Europeans could tolerate the uncertainty that comes with the American emphasis on constant change.

Conversely, the optimism with which Americans have traditionally regarded their prospects may make them peculiarly susceptible to the promise of a roller-coaster economy.

Mr. Grant said, "The Daily News can put Phil Purcell's picture on the front page and his salary and there's not going to be rioting, because people sense that if Morgan Stanley does better, they're going to do better."