Minnesota tumbles four places to 10th on CNBC’s ‘Top States for Business’ rankings
That was then…
Back in 2023, there was much excitement among Minnesota’s political leaders and journalists when our state placed fifth on CNBC’s annual ranking of “America’s Top States for Business.” Some headlines read:
- Minnesota ranks No. 5 among ‘America’s Top States for Business’ by CNBC — Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
- Minnesota knocks Texas out of Top 5 in CNBC’s ‘Top States for Business’ ranking — Bring Me the News
- Minnesota ranked as a top state for businesses, surpasses Texas — WCCO
- CNBC Ranks Minnesota 5th Best State for Business — KNSI Radio
- Minnesota ranked as a top state for businesses — KTTC
- Minnesota named a Top 5 state for business — Southern Minnesota News
Governor Walz was so pleased with the fact that Minnesota had ranked ahead of Texas that not only did he tweet about it when the rankings came out, but he cited this “fact” subsequently:
…this is now
By contrast, I cannot find a single mention in the local media or from our state’s politicians about the 2025 rankings, released last week. Our local newshounds seem to be sleeping on a story: Minnesota fell four spots from sixth in 2024 to tenth this year: only five other states recorded a larger fall in their ranking.
On six of the ranking’s ten subindicies, Minnesota’s ranking went up or down by no more than two spots: Infrastructure, Cost of Doing Business, Business Friendliness, Quality of Life, Technology & Innovation, and Cost of Living. For Education, Minnesota acutually rose by five places. For the other three, Minnesota’s ranking fell; Economy down by four, Access to Capital down by six, and Workforce down by eleven.
About our state’s worst performing measure, the methodology tells us that:
With skilled workers in such short supply, and with the rising role of advanced manufacturing, the definition of a qualified worker is expanding. In addition to measuring each state’s concentration of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers and the percentage of workers with college degrees, we also consider workers with associate degrees and industry-recognized certificates. We look at which states are most successful in attracting talent at all levels, considering the net migration of educated workers to each state, and how states are faring in the competition to attract skilled workers. We look at state worker training programs, right to work laws, and worker productivity based on economic output per job.
Regular readers of this site will not be surprised to see Minnesota struggling here.
These rankings are, as I have argued before, no substitute for the data. That said, they have long been pointed to by the Babbitts in local media looking for feel good stories and local politicians looking to escape from the often grim reality found in the data. Tenth is still a pretty good ranking out of fifty, but given the direction of travel, the media’s silence on this latest data is no surprise and one wonders whether local politicians will be so quick in future to use it to refute numbers from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statstics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Internal Revenue Service.
And Texas ranked second.