Comparison
Colorado vs Pennsylvania
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 59 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
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 Pennsylvania between 26 and 44. Colorado finishes above Pennsylvania 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
- 8930Starting up59 apart — Colorado 89, Pennsylvania 30
- 6836Labour market32 apart — Colorado 68, Pennsylvania 36
- 8959Prosperity30 apart — Colorado 89, Pennsylvania 59
- 4826Housing permits and prices22 apart — Colorado 48, Pennsylvania 26
- 7155Population health16 apart — Colorado 71, Pennsylvania 55
- 9276Fiscal standing16 apart — Colorado 92, Pennsylvania 76
- 6171Openness10 apart — Colorado 61, Pennsylvania 71
- 4951Productive base2 apart — Colorado 49, Pennsylvania 51
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Pennsylvania
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.