I found this 2013 post, where I proposed a set of quantitative skills every reporter should have to cover health care+public policy. These are roughly the skills I'd expect of the median undergraduate public policy major. Curious what others think. (0/) https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/numbers-stuff-every-reporter-should-know/

1.Knowing how to interpret the size of a linear regression coefficient. (1/)

2.Understanding what statistical significance means–and doesn’t mean. [I would now add the p-hacking issue.] (2/)

3.Understanding what r-squared is--and isn't. (3/)

4.Having some sense of why regressions go wrong—for example, the possibility of selection bias and reverse causality (4/)

5.Understanding the inherent limitations of cross-sectional analyses, such comparisons of mortality across states with different partisan alignments or levels of inequality (5/)

6.Innate suspicion of any complex statistical analysis that lacks a compelling underlying causal story. This would include the fact that most elaborate non-experimental analyses that reach dramatic or clinically counter-intuitive conclusions turn out to be wrong (6/)

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect reporters to know anything that requires a derivative, the words “heteroskedastic,” or “instrumental variables.” If covering health policy or public health, I would add a few more items (7/)

Knowing what odds ratios and relative risks are, and how these concepts can be misleading when base rates vary (8/)

Understanding the basic properties of screening tests–e.g. the index card of formulas that link the sensitivity and specificity of screening tests and underlying prevalence of a condition to positive and negative predictive value (9/)

Familiarity with milestones such as the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, the 5-10 leading articles in the field and the classics such as the Social Transformation of American Medicine that provide the context of current health policy (10/).

Familiarity with basic economic vocabulary such as price elasticity of demand, and basic insurance vocabulary such as moral hazard and adverse selection (11/)

Understanding the basic mechanics of a clinical trial, including terms such as “intent to treat” and “effect of treatment on the treated group.” (12/)

[Understanding the basic structures of social insurance and public policy: SSI vs SSDI, the major Medicare and Medicaid populations, Rough budgets and populations for TANF and EITC.] (13/).

Knowing basic numbers on U.S. health expenditures, overall and within the key categories subject to debate, and knowing basic numbers regarding leading causes of mortality (14/).

"Unfortunately, we live in a stupidly innumerate society and popular culture. This puts reporters at a tremendous disadvantage, since they come out of this culture. They need to fight the stupid and tool-up." (15/)

"None of the above items is very hard. You can’t be a good film critic if you’ve never seen Citizen Kane, Star Wars, or the Godfather. You can’t cover a foreign country if you don’t know the language+culture." (16/)

"You can’t cover public policy properly if you don’t speak the language and lack bare-bones familiarity with the tools of that trade," either. (17/17)

That’s my old list, anyway. Is it reasonable? What's missing?