Comparison
Colorado vs New Jersey
They differ most on labour market — Colorado leads by 54 points. How tight the market is, and which way it moved last month.
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 New Jersey between 9 and 36. Colorado finishes above New Jersey 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
- 6814Labour market54 apart — Colorado 68, New Jersey 14
- 8945Starting up44 apart — Colorado 89, New Jersey 45
- 4819Housing permits and prices29 apart — Colorado 48, New Jersey 19
- 9268Fiscal standing24 apart — Colorado 92, New Jersey 68
- 7194Population health23 apart — Colorado 71, New Jersey 94
- 6176Openness15 apart — Colorado 61, New Jersey 76
- 4950Productive base1 apart — Colorado 49, New Jersey 50
- 8988Prosperity1 apart — Colorado 89, New Jersey 88
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
New Jersey
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.