Comparison
Colorado vs Mississippi
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 88 points. What the average person in the state actually earns.
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 Mississippi between 26 and 46. Colorado finishes above Mississippi 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
- 891Prosperity88 apart — Colorado 89, Mississippi 1
- 711Population health70 apart — Colorado 71, Mississippi 1
- 6127Openness34 apart — Colorado 61, Mississippi 27
- 4865Housing permits and prices17 apart — Colorado 48, Mississippi 65
- 8978Starting up11 apart — Colorado 89, Mississippi 78
- 6879Labour market11 apart — Colorado 68, Mississippi 79
- 9284Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, Mississippi 84
- 4942Productive base7 apart — Colorado 49, Mississippi 42
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Mississippi
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.