Comparison
Colorado vs Massachusetts
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 74 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
No defensible weighting reverses this ordering
The 8 pillars are averaged equally, which is declared rather than tuned. 20,000 other weightings were drawn and the whole table re-ranked under each; restricted to the ones a person could defend — every pillar between 6.25% and 25% of the total — Colorado ranks between 1 and 3 and Massachusetts between 9 and 39. Colorado finishes above Massachusetts in every one of those 20,000 weightings — not one reverses it — so on this pair the ordering is a result rather than an artefact of the equal weighting.
875 of the 1,275 possible pairings of these 51 jurisdictions are reversed by some defensible weighting. Most comparisons a reader can build on this site do not have a defensible ordering, and the ones that do are worth more than the rank beside them.
Pillar by pillar, widest divergence first
- 8915Starting up74 apart — Colorado 89, Massachusetts 15
- 6824Labour market44 apart — Colorado 68, Massachusetts 24
- 485Housing permits and prices43 apart — Colorado 48, Massachusetts 5
- 7196Population health25 apart — Colorado 71, Massachusetts 96
- 4960Productive base11 apart — Colorado 49, Massachusetts 60
- 8997Prosperity8 apart — Colorado 89, Massachusetts 97
- 6162Openness1 apart — Colorado 61, Massachusetts 62
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Colorado 92, Massachusetts 92
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Massachusetts
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State Government Tax Collections. Where a state levies no such tax the survey records it, and so does this — the absence is a fact, not a gap.