Comparison
Colorado vs North Dakota
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 76 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
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 North Dakota between 29 and 43. Colorado finishes above North Dakota 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
- 8913Starting up76 apart — Colorado 89, North Dakota 13
- 8950Prosperity39 apart — Colorado 89, North Dakota 50
- 6127Openness34 apart — Colorado 61, North Dakota 27
- 7147Population health24 apart — Colorado 71, North Dakota 47
- 6851Labour market17 apart — Colorado 68, North Dakota 51
- 4861Housing permits and prices13 apart — Colorado 48, North Dakota 61
- 4958Productive base9 apart — Colorado 49, North Dakota 58
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Colorado 92, North Dakota 92
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
North Dakota
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.