Comparison
Alabama vs Rhode Island
They differ most on population health — Rhode Island leads by 77 points. One comparable public-health read, asked the same way of every state.
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 — Alabama ranks between 37 and 47 and Rhode Island between 34 and 50. Alabama is published ahead of Rhode Island at 46 against 46, but 9,834 of those 20,000 weightings — 49.2% — put Rhode Island 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
- 784Population health77 apart — Alabama 7, Rhode Island 84
- 964Prosperity55 apart — Alabama 9, Rhode Island 64
- 639Housing permits and prices54 apart — Alabama 63, Rhode Island 9
- 6217Starting up45 apart — Alabama 62, Rhode Island 17
- 270Openness27 apart — Alabama 27, Rhode Island 0
- 4963Labour market14 apart — Alabama 49, Rhode Island 63
- 9284Fiscal standing8 apart — Alabama 92, Rhode Island 84
- —33Productive basenot comparable — Alabama no score, Rhode Island 33
Tax structure
Alabama
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Rhode Island
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.