Comparison
Indiana vs Kansas
They differ most on prosperity — Kansas leads by 28 points. What the average person in the state actually earns.
This ordering turns on the weighting
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 — Indiana ranks between 23 and 41 and Kansas between 24 and 39. Indiana is published ahead of Kansas at 32 against 32, but 10,198 of those 20,000 weightings — 51.0% — put Kansas first. The ordering of these two is a property of the weighting as much as of the states. Read the pillars below instead: those are measured, and the weighting does not touch them.
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
- 1846Prosperity28 apart — Indiana 18, Kansas 46
- 10084Fiscal standing16 apart — Indiana 100, Kansas 84
- 3318Openness15 apart — Indiana 33, Kansas 18
- 5242Starting up10 apart — Indiana 52, Kansas 42
- 6758Productive base9 apart — Indiana 67, Kansas 58
- 2230Population health8 apart — Indiana 22, Kansas 30
- 6775Housing permits and prices8 apart — Indiana 67, Kansas 75
- 4754Labour market7 apart — Indiana 47, Kansas 54
Tax structure
Indiana
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Kansas
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.