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I don't know if there's a term for this, but it's something I've noticed. Suppose you have the head of an agency called the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency, and the whole point of your agency is to regulate Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. What many people would expect is that the head of the agency would naturally be an expert on Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Instead, what we see in the real world is that the head of said agency is not an expert on any single one of the things that he's supposed to help regulate, let alone all three. I think this becomes more pronounced the further you move up the political chain, all the way to the President. No senator can be expected to be an expert on economics, nuclear power, firearms, and The Middle East, but they are all expected to weigh in, and potentially vote regarding all of these issues. The President gets this worst of all, as he's supposed to execute on every single issue Congress votes on. This seems to be built into the system from the start.
Perhaps it's just another sign of how completely warped the federal government has become compared to what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
Expecting someone to be able to ballpark the population of Iran isn't actually looking for deep expertise though, it's expecting a strong generalist's knowledge of trivia. Sitting United States Senators should be better than a typical bar trivia team at knowing things like world capitals and national populations. If they're not at that level, I'd consider them too stupid or incurious to hold the office. Senators should be polymaths with strong interests in things like CIA World Factbook information.
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A necessity of elected political leadership is that they are elected, which is going to tend to select for electability rather than expertise. With appointees one expects a measure of expertise (and you even get it occasionally), but people like senators or the president are necessarily going to be amateurs and generalists. They have staffers and career civil servants to provide them with expert advice.
The first cabinet was full of talented amateurs. The first Senate was basically a collection of lawyers and planters/rich farmers.
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There was a question asked during the 2021 New York City mayoral race: what is the median sale price for a home in Brooklyn?
A few candidates gave answers of varying comical inaccuracy. One candidate was Shaun Donovan who has many years of housing policy experience.
As Wikipedia summarizes Donovan:
Many years of directly relevant experience including years working this at the highest level on this topic for New York City. His estimate for the median Brooklyn home sale price in 2021 was $100,000. Wrong order of magnitude. The cheapest listed unit on real estate websites for Brooklyn at that time was $100k for a parking spot. The very cheapest actual homes were many hundreds of thousands of dollars with the median sale price over $900k.
So yeah, somehow the head of multiple relevant agencies for years at the Federal and local level knows fuck all about the basics of his specialty.
I heard the audio from these interviews and interestingly Andrew Yang quickly reasoned that the median would not be significantly offset by the few super expensive homes in Brooklyn and guessed $900k which is within a few percent of the correct answer. Yang has of course never been appointed to be the head of any agency. Nerds may be right, but always be losing.
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This is sort of different with senators though. They're elected to represent their state and pass legislation, and to some extent just to be a popular charismatic person who wins election. They can hire staffers to be subject matter experts on whatever the current issue is, it's really not their job to know technical details.
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