Comparison
Colorado vs Michigan
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 62 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 Michigan between 17 and 32. Colorado finishes above Michigan 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
- 8927Prosperity62 apart — Colorado 89, Michigan 27
- 8961Starting up28 apart — Colorado 89, Michigan 61
- 6846Labour market22 apart — Colorado 68, Michigan 46
- 7151Population health20 apart — Colorado 71, Michigan 51
- 4960Productive base11 apart — Colorado 49, Michigan 60
- 4841Housing permits and prices7 apart — Colorado 48, Michigan 41
- 6160Openness1 apart — Colorado 61, Michigan 60
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Colorado 92, Michigan 92
Tax structure
Colorado
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.