Comparison
California vs Michigan
They differ most on prosperity — California leads by 55 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 — California ranks between 15 and 39 and Michigan between 17 and 32. California is published ahead of Michigan at 25 against 25, but 9,410 of those 20,000 weightings — 47.0% — put Michigan 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
- 8227Prosperity55 apart — California 82, Michigan 27
- 8851Population health37 apart — California 88, Michigan 51
- 2961Starting up32 apart — California 29, Michigan 61
- 1546Labour market31 apart — California 15, Michigan 46
- 1741Housing permits and prices24 apart — California 17, Michigan 41
- 8492Fiscal standing8 apart — California 84, Michigan 92
- 6460Productive base4 apart — California 64, Michigan 60
- 6360Openness3 apart — California 63, Michigan 60
Tax structure
California
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Michigan
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.