Comparison
Alabama vs Colorado
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 80 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 — Alabama ranks between 37 and 47 and Colorado between 1 and 3. Colorado finishes above Alabama 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
- 989Prosperity80 apart — Alabama 9, Colorado 89
- 771Population health64 apart — Alabama 7, Colorado 71
- 2761Openness34 apart — Alabama 27, Colorado 61
- 6289Starting up27 apart — Alabama 62, Colorado 89
- 4968Labour market19 apart — Alabama 49, Colorado 68
- 6348Housing permits and prices15 apart — Alabama 63, Colorado 48
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Alabama 92, Colorado 92
- —49Productive basenot comparable — Alabama no score, Colorado 49
Tax structure
Alabama
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Colorado
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.