Comparison
Colorado vs Iowa
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 63 points. What the average person in the state actually earns.
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 Iowa between 8 and 26. Colorado is published ahead of Iowa at 1 against 15, but 16 of those 20,000 weightings — 0.08% — put Iowa 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
- 8926Prosperity63 apart — Colorado 89, Iowa 26
- 8935Starting up54 apart — Colorado 89, Iowa 35
- 4881Housing permits and prices33 apart — Colorado 48, Iowa 81
- 7150Population health21 apart — Colorado 71, Iowa 50
- 6847Labour market21 apart — Colorado 68, Iowa 47
- 4968Productive base19 apart — Colorado 49, Iowa 68
- 92100Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, Iowa 100
- 6160Openness1 apart — Colorado 61, Iowa 60
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Iowa
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.