Comparison
Nebraska vs South Dakota
They differ most on starting up — South Dakota leads by 19 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
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 — Nebraska ranks between 7 and 23 and South Dakota between 7 and 26. Nebraska is published ahead of South Dakota at 12 against 12, but 8,057 of those 20,000 weightings — 40.3% — put South Dakota 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
- 3958Starting up19 apart — Nebraska 39, South Dakota 58
- 4728Population health19 apart — Nebraska 47, South Dakota 28
- 2718Openness9 apart — Nebraska 27, South Dakota 18
- 92100Fiscal standing8 apart — Nebraska 92, South Dakota 100
- 7063Productive base7 apart — Nebraska 70, South Dakota 63
- 6470Labour market6 apart — Nebraska 64, South Dakota 70
- 7977Housing permits and prices2 apart — Nebraska 79, South Dakota 77
- 5657Prosperity1 apart — Nebraska 56, South Dakota 57
Tax structure
Nebraska
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
South Dakota
No individual income tax
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.