“But why didn’t he pass it? It was a sure goal!” “If we’d made the substitution earlier, we could’ve held on until the 90th minute.” “If he’d gone one-on-one, he’d have been all alone.” If you’re a soccer fan, you’ve probably caught yourself saying these phrases—or similar ones—many times while watching a game on TV or at the stadium. In a world where we’re all coaches, we feel compelled to always weigh in on the right decision a player or coach should have made so that the game’s outcome would have gone our way.

However, this is unfair. Not because “it’s a different story with a guitar,” but simply because most of the time, our parallel scenario isn’t compatible with the context in which the game was unfolding. He didn’t pass it, because for that he would have had to be left-handed; if we’d made that switch earlier, we would have given the ball away to the opponent, and that could have been worse; to have taken on the defender and succeeded, he would have needed a skill he doesn’t have (something we U fans suffer through every weekend). The alternative scenarios we imagine aren’t the only possible outcomes, and often they aren’t even achievable.

This obsession with “what ifs” isn’t unique to soccer. In public policy, it’s a daily occurrence, and the current debate has been rife with such scenarios: “Why wasn’t the quarantine ordered sooner?” “We should have signed contracts with this lab instead of that one,” and so on. While many of these criticisms are valid, they fail to acknowledge that the decisions were made based on the information available at the time (or, as they say in soccer, “with the benefit of hindsight”). For example, not recommending mask use at the start of the pandemic, or the initial belief that children were “super-spreaders”—views that were corrected once experts were able to gather more data and conduct further studies.

Others are simply fictitious and do not align with the options that were available at the time. Locally, some have criticized the decision to sign contracts with Sinovac rather than with Moderna or Pfizer on a larger scale. It is true that the vaccines from these companies have shown greater efficacy than Coronavac (a point we discussed in our previous column^[1]), but given the health and geopolitical conditions, that scenario was not possible. The counterfactual—as our neighbors and most emerging countries have shown—was having no vaccine at all. That is the fair comparison. And between having a less effective vaccine (though still beneficial) or none at all, I, for one, wouldn’t miss it.

Despite the above, this should not be a source of comfort. In this and other debates, we must always consider counterfactuals before making decisions, especially in such sensitive areas that are funded with everyone’s resources. This requires listening to the experts, having more and better professionals in the field of project evaluation, and never forgetting that one peso (or any other resource) used in one area is one peso or resource that is not used elsewhere. For now, all we can do is keep shouting at the screen (or at the stadium, when we can), trying to imagine scenarios where everything turns out well. Or, well, at least better.

 Nathan Pincheira | Chief Economist at Fynsa

^[1] The Ministry of Health has published a new, more detailed study on effectiveness levels, which is available here