Comparison
Colorado vs Utah
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 32 points. What the average person in the state actually earns.
This ordering turns on the weighting
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 Utah between 2 and 4. Colorado is published ahead of Utah at 1 against 2, but 1,768 of those 20,000 weightings — 8.8% — put Utah first. The ordering of these two is a property of the weighting as much as of the states. Read the pillars below instead: those are measured, and the weighting does not touch them.
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
- 8957Prosperity32 apart — Colorado 89, Utah 57
- 8970Starting up19 apart — Colorado 89, Utah 70
- 6179Openness18 apart — Colorado 61, Utah 79
- 6853Labour market15 apart — Colorado 68, Utah 53
- 4958Productive base9 apart — Colorado 49, Utah 58
- 4857Housing permits and prices9 apart — Colorado 48, Utah 57
- 92100Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, Utah 100
- 7168Population health3 apart — Colorado 71, Utah 68
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Utah
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.