Comparison
Illinois vs South Carolina
They differ most on prosperity — Illinois leads by 51 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 — Illinois ranks between 19 and 39 and South Carolina between 16 and 36. Illinois is published ahead of South Carolina at 29 against 29, but 9,749 of those 20,000 weightings — 48.7% — put South Carolina 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
- 7322Prosperity51 apart — Illinois 73, South Carolina 22
- 52100Fiscal standing48 apart — Illinois 52, South Carolina 100
- 3074Starting up44 apart — Illinois 30, South Carolina 74
- 5718Openness39 apart — Illinois 57, South Carolina 18
- 3771Housing permits and prices34 apart — Illinois 37, South Carolina 71
- 7646Productive base30 apart — Illinois 76, South Carolina 46
- 5531Population health24 apart — Illinois 55, South Carolina 31
- 4763Labour market16 apart — Illinois 47, South Carolina 63
Tax structure
Illinois
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
South Carolina
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.