Comparison
Colorado vs Kentucky
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 82 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 — Colorado ranks between 1 and 3 and Kentucky between 35 and 47. Colorado finishes above Kentucky 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
- 897Prosperity82 apart — Colorado 89, Kentucky 7
- 7122Population health49 apart — Colorado 71, Kentucky 22
- 8955Starting up34 apart — Colorado 89, Kentucky 55
- 6845Labour market23 apart — Colorado 68, Kentucky 45
- 9276Fiscal standing16 apart — Colorado 92, Kentucky 76
- 4956Productive base7 apart — Colorado 49, Kentucky 56
- 6156Openness5 apart — Colorado 61, Kentucky 56
- 4850Housing permits and prices2 apart — Colorado 48, Kentucky 50
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Kentucky
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.