Comparison
Alaska vs Colorado
They differ most on openness — Colorado leads by 61 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.
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 — Alaska ranks between 34 and 48 and Colorado between 1 and 3. Colorado finishes above Alaska 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
- 061Openness61 apart — Alaska 0, Colorado 61
- 2971Population health42 apart — Alaska 29, Colorado 71
- 2668Labour market42 apart — Alaska 26, Colorado 68
- 5289Prosperity37 apart — Alaska 52, Colorado 89
- 7692Fiscal standing16 apart — Alaska 76, Colorado 92
- 4448Housing permits and prices4 apart — Alaska 44, Colorado 48
- 4749Productive base2 apart — Alaska 47, Colorado 49
- 8889Starting up1 apart — Alaska 88, Colorado 89
Tax structure
Alaska
No individual income tax
Corporate income tax levied
Colorado
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.