Comparison
Colorado vs Kansas
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 47 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 Kansas between 24 and 39. Colorado finishes above Kansas 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
- 8942Starting up47 apart — Colorado 89, Kansas 42
- 8946Prosperity43 apart — Colorado 89, Kansas 46
- 6118Openness43 apart — Colorado 61, Kansas 18
- 7130Population health41 apart — Colorado 71, Kansas 30
- 4875Housing permits and prices27 apart — Colorado 48, Kansas 75
- 6854Labour market14 apart — Colorado 68, Kansas 54
- 4958Productive base9 apart — Colorado 49, Kansas 58
- 9284Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, Kansas 84
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Kansas
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.