How do we judge government leaders? Not by the success of policies they don't understand

Cartoon source: Dear Kitty. Some Blog

Joshua Partlow, in his review in today's Washington Post of THE DICTATOR'S SHADOW: Life Under Augusto Pinochet by Heraldo Muñoz notes that while the economic policies implemented under Pinochet's administration were successful, and were developed by economists he supported, Pinochet himself understood them only poorly.

I lived in Chile in the pre-Allende, pre-Pinochet epoch, and I don't think that there would have been a rejection of state socialism without a military dictatorship, although I guess a much less dreadful dictatorship might have institutionalized the "Washington Consensus" like policies. But that is not the point I would make.

The question is, how do we judge someone like Pinochet. If he failed to have the economic expertise to adequately judge the likely outcomes of the economic policies put in place by his administration, or indeed of the policies that would otherwise have been in place, then it seems to me that he should not be credited with their success. Other dictators have imposed economic policies which they too failed to understand, and those policies had disastrous effects (Idi Amin comes to mind). On the other hand, Pinochet may not have fully understood the human suffering that he was unleashing on the people of Chile through his military policies and the policies that suppressed internal opposition.

Perhaps, given our inability to adequately predict the outcomes of government policies, we should not judge political leaders by those outcomes. Perhaps we should judge them by the processes that they use to develop those policies, and whether those processes reflect the wisdom embodied in our public institutions. The American revolutionaries of the 18th century were right in substituting local democracy for distant monarchy, but had great respect for democratic process. They deserve credit, so revolution per se is not necessarily wrong. My guess is that Pinochet deserves our reprobation.