"But why didn't he pass it? It was a sure goal!" "If we had made the substitution earlier, we could have held out until the 90th minute." "If he had taken it on, he would have been left unmarked." If you are a soccer fan, you have probably heard yourself saying these or similar phrases many times while watching a game on TV or at the stadium. In a world where we are all experts, it is mandatory to always give our opinion on the correct decision that a player or coach should have made so that the result of the game would have been favorable to our expectations.

However, this is unfair. Not because "it's different with a guitar," but simply because most of the time, our parallel scenario is not compatible with the context in which the game was developing. He didn't pass it, because to do so he would have had to be left-handed; if we had made that change earlier, we would have given control of the ball to the opponent, and that could have been worse; to have faced up and been successful in that, he would have had to have a technique that he doesn't have (something that we at the U suffer from every weekend). The alternative scenarios we imagine are not the only possible outcome and are often not even achievable.

This addiction to "what if" scenarios is not exclusive to soccer. It is commonplace in public policy, and the current debate has been full of such exercises: "Why wasn't the quarantine decreed earlier?", "We should have signed contracts with this laboratory and not that one," etc. While many of these criticisms are well-founded, they do not take into account that they were made based on more information than was available at the time (or, as they say in soccer, "with the benefit of hindsight"). For example, not recommending the use of masks at the beginning of the pandemic, or considering children to be "super-spreaders," which was corrected after experts were able to gather more data and studies.

Others are simply fictitious and do not correspond to the options that were available at the time. Locally, some have criticized the decision to sign contracts with Sinovac rather than Moderna or Pfizer on a larger scale. It is true that the vaccines from these laboratories have shown greater efficacy than Coronavac (a topic 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 to have no vaccine at all. That is the fair comparison. And between having a less effective (though equally beneficial) vaccine or none at all, at least for me, it's a no-brainer.

Despite the above, this should not be a consolation. In this and other debates, counterfactuals must always be considered before making decisions, especially in such sensitive areas that are financed with everyone's resources. This requires listening to the voice of experts, having more and better professionals in the area of project evaluation, and never forgetting that a peso (or any other resource) used on one side is a peso or resource that is no longer used on another. For now, all we can do is continue shouting at the screen (or at the court, when possible), trying to imagine scenarios in which everything turns out well. Or 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.