What you would not do is judge him by the outcome. Even the best physicians have patients die. And even witchdoctors can have patients recover. Randomness is a fact of life (and death). In the case of a medical doctor, I think the answer is clear: Instead of looking at the outcome, you would judge him by the decisions he makes. That is, you would examine whether he followed best practices for the circumstances he faced.
Similarly, randomness is a fact of economic life, and it would be a mistake to judge a president by the economic outcome during his administration. It is better to look at the decisions that president made, and to acknowledge that the outcome is a function of those decisions and many other factors not under his control. As an economist, I have views about what best practices are for economic policy, and I judge presidents by how closely they adhere to those principles.
[From Greg Mankiw's Blog: Judging Presidents]
So, are we judging Ma and Chen with the same principles?
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