Comparison
Colorado vs New Mexico
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 76 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 New Mexico between 51 and 51. Colorado finishes above New Mexico 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
- 8913Prosperity76 apart — Colorado 89, New Mexico 13
- 610Openness61 apart — Colorado 61, New Mexico 0
- 8934Starting up55 apart — Colorado 89, New Mexico 34
- 7123Population health48 apart — Colorado 71, New Mexico 23
- 6826Labour market42 apart — Colorado 68, New Mexico 26
- 4919Productive base30 apart — Colorado 49, New Mexico 19
- 4865Housing permits and prices17 apart — Colorado 48, New Mexico 65
- 9284Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, New Mexico 84
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
New Mexico
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.