<p>borkborkbork, the South clearly has a much lower cost of living and, lower average salaries (I haven’t looked at recent data, but this was certainly true). In thinking about New Jersey, you need to put the Sopranos out of your mind and think about the number of people who work on Wall Street and for NY law firms and major accounting firms and consulting firms (as well as advertising, etc.). These employers tend to select for pretty high IQ and motivation (people come from all over the world to work in NY and many of them when they have kids live in NJ). To the extent that IQ or whatever definition of smartness is hereditable, you’d expect smart kids. To the extent that IQ is environmental, you have a concentration of super-motivated parents who probably are working hard to establish an environment that they think will lead to smart kids. Either way, the data about cutoffs for NM finalists does shed a fair bit of light on the OP’s question (recognizing that PSAT scores not being the only way to measure smartness).</p>
<p>Whether the bright folks in NJ would have a happier and more meaningful life in Mississippi than New Jersey is a value judgment I’ll leave to them. I do know that there are quite a few folks who’ve moved from the Northeast to Raleigh Durham and Austin.</p>