Comparison
Colorado vs South Dakota
They differ most on population health — Colorado leads by 43 points. One comparable public-health read, asked the same way of every state.
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 South Dakota between 7 and 26. Colorado is published ahead of South Dakota at 1 against 12, but 4 of those 20,000 weightings — 0.02% — put South Dakota 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
- 7128Population health43 apart — Colorado 71, South Dakota 28
- 6118Openness43 apart — Colorado 61, South Dakota 18
- 8957Prosperity32 apart — Colorado 89, South Dakota 57
- 8958Starting up31 apart — Colorado 89, South Dakota 58
- 4877Housing permits and prices29 apart — Colorado 48, South Dakota 77
- 4963Productive base14 apart — Colorado 49, South Dakota 63
- 92100Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, South Dakota 100
- 6870Labour market2 apart — Colorado 68, South Dakota 70
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
South Dakota
No individual income tax
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.