Comparison
Massachusetts vs New York
They differ most on starting up — New York leads by 18 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
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 — Massachusetts ranks between 9 and 39 and New York between 12 and 36. Massachusetts is published ahead of New York at 19 against 19, but 8,836 of those 20,000 weightings — 44.2% — put New York 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
- 1533Starting up18 apart — Massachusetts 15, New York 33
- 9785Prosperity12 apart — Massachusetts 97, New York 85
- 513Housing permits and prices8 apart — Massachusetts 5, New York 13
- 9690Population health6 apart — Massachusetts 96, New York 90
- 2418Labour market6 apart — Massachusetts 24, New York 18
- 6056Productive base4 apart — Massachusetts 60, New York 56
- 6263Openness1 apart — Massachusetts 62, New York 63
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Massachusetts 92, New York 92
Tax structure
Massachusetts
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
New York
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.