Sure, Cambodia is one, North Korea, China in the 50s, Zimbabwe... Millions dead.

Universal healthcare, social security and pensions in Germany (late 19th century): millions saved.

And it's that big a political experiment that the most powerful country in the world still doesn't dare to replicate it in its entirety.

USSR. Millions lost.

USA's New Deal: potentially millions saved from starvation.

That's the problem with those comparisons: it's easy to point at the precise body count of radical experiments that went the wrong way, but quite hard to enumerate the lives saved due to those that worked out. Kind of survivorship bias in reverse.

I'd guess the establishment and enforcement of sanitary standards (which, at the beginning, was considered quite radical) saved more people than all dictators of the world together managed to kill. But that's as hand-wavy as anything else in this subthread.

You can't know how it's going to play out or it's not an experiment...

In what way were Pol Pot era Cambodia and Mugabe era Zimbabwe political experiments? They were/are dictators! There's nothing remotely radical about dictatorships.

Dictators are almost always radical.

As a rule they tear down, or kill all of the people who oppose them. Which leads to a radical shifting of institutions in a country, to such a degree that post dictator, the places almost never revert to a state that resembles what they were like pre-dictator.

Dictators consistently alter the course of history for the places they rule.

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I understand that you are saying that as we know the results, these things are not radical. I disagree, known results can be very radical.

Sure they were. Google "year zero". And Mugabe's experiment is seeing if "war veterans" make good farmers. Before he came to power Zimbabwe was called The Breadbasket Of Africa...

Never let facts get in the way of hyperbole.