Comparison
Arizona vs Colorado
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 52 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 — Arizona ranks between 15 and 34 and Colorado between 1 and 3. Colorado finishes above Arizona 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
- 3789Prosperity52 apart — Arizona 37, Colorado 89
- 3768Labour market31 apart — Arizona 37, Colorado 68
- 4571Population health26 apart — Arizona 45, Colorado 71
- 3649Productive base13 apart — Arizona 36, Colorado 49
- 7789Starting up12 apart — Arizona 77, Colorado 89
- 5848Housing permits and prices10 apart — Arizona 58, Colorado 48
- 5361Openness8 apart — Arizona 53, Colorado 61
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Arizona 92, Colorado 92
Tax structure
Arizona
Individual income tax levied
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.