Comparison
Michigan vs Minnesota
They differ most on openness — Michigan leads by 60 points. Whether the state publishes in a form a machine can read: an open-data portal that answers; incentive, permit and finance records as data; and newsroom feeds.
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 — Michigan ranks between 17 and 32 and Minnesota between 12 and 37. Michigan is published ahead of Minnesota at 25 against 25, but 10,721 of those 20,000 weightings — 53.6% — put Minnesota 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
- 600Openness60 apart — Michigan 60, Minnesota 0
- 2775Prosperity48 apart — Michigan 27, Minnesota 75
- 6120Starting up41 apart — Michigan 61, Minnesota 20
- 5177Population health26 apart — Michigan 51, Minnesota 77
- 4163Housing permits and prices22 apart — Michigan 41, Minnesota 63
- 4636Labour market10 apart — Michigan 46, Minnesota 36
- 6069Productive base9 apart — Michigan 60, Minnesota 69
- 92100Fiscal standing8 apart — Michigan 92, Minnesota 100
Tax structure
Michigan
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Minnesota
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.