Comparison
Colorado vs South Carolina
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 67 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 South Carolina between 16 and 36. Colorado finishes above South Carolina 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
- 8922Prosperity67 apart — Colorado 89, South Carolina 22
- 6118Openness43 apart — Colorado 61, South Carolina 18
- 7131Population health40 apart — Colorado 71, South Carolina 31
- 4871Housing permits and prices23 apart — Colorado 48, South Carolina 71
- 8974Starting up15 apart — Colorado 89, South Carolina 74
- 92100Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, South Carolina 100
- 6863Labour market5 apart — Colorado 68, South Carolina 63
- 4946Productive base3 apart — Colorado 49, South Carolina 46
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
South Carolina
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.