Comparison
Iowa vs Tennessee
They differ most on openness — Iowa leads by 42 points. Whether the state publishes in a form a machine can read: an open-data portal that answers; incentive, permit and finance records as data; and newsroom feeds.
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 — Iowa ranks between 8 and 26 and Tennessee between 8 and 28. Iowa is published ahead of Tennessee at 15 against 15, but 8,977 of those 20,000 weightings — 44.9% — put Tennessee 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
- 6018Openness42 apart — Iowa 60, Tennessee 18
- 3564Starting up29 apart — Iowa 35, Tennessee 64
- 8165Housing permits and prices16 apart — Iowa 81, Tennessee 65
- 4757Labour market10 apart — Iowa 47, Tennessee 57
- 2631Prosperity5 apart — Iowa 26, Tennessee 31
- 6869Productive base1 apart — Iowa 68, Tennessee 69
- 100100Fiscal standinglevel — Iowa 100, Tennessee 100
- 50—Population healthnot comparable — Iowa 50, Tennessee no score
Tax structure
Iowa
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Tennessee
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.