There is a whole lot more that goes into an economy than UE, GDP and the other 6 "metrics" they used in that article.

That said, ND can't physically sustain an economy that's bigger and more completely healthy than say a state like CO, just because it doesn't have the infrastructure, or people to do it. It's in one of the biggest booms in the last 30 years, but doesn't have the population, and infrastructure (Housing, support business, ect) to fully take advantage. That's why McDonalds is paying $20/hour to start up there. It will come around sooner or later but it's going to take a while to stabilize.

Alaska suffers from the same problem, and it's why they have had a rough few years, and ND is part of what has done it to them. There's a hell of a lot of people in that line of work that went from working on the slope in weather that is a LOT worse than ND, to ND and a hell of a lot shorter plane ride home. Couple that with an extremely low density of private land in Alaska vs ND and the oil exploration opportunities dry up, where the opposite is true in ND which further aided capitalization.


There's some reasoning behind the rankings they used but there's definitely a political slant to it. But there is with anything produced by major media.