Comparison
Maine vs Mississippi
They differ most on population health — Maine leads by 59 points. One comparable public-health read, asked the same way of every state.
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 — Maine ranks between 34 and 48 and Mississippi between 26 and 46. Maine is published ahead of Mississippi at 40 against 40, but 11,034 of those 20,000 weightings — 55.2% — put Mississippi 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
- 601Population health59 apart — Maine 60, Mississippi 1
- 2078Starting up58 apart — Maine 20, Mississippi 78
- 541Prosperity53 apart — Maine 54, Mississippi 1
- 027Openness27 apart — Maine 0, Mississippi 27
- 4965Housing permits and prices16 apart — Maine 49, Mississippi 65
- 3342Productive base9 apart — Maine 33, Mississippi 42
- 7279Labour market7 apart — Maine 72, Mississippi 79
- 8484Fiscal standinglevel — Maine 84, Mississippi 84
Tax structure
Maine
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Mississippi
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.