"But why didn't he pass it to him, it was a sure goal!", "If we made the change before, we would have held on until the 90", "If he faced the ball, he was on his own". Surely, if you are a soccer fan, you have 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 technicians, it is always mandatory to give our opinion about the right decision that a player or coach should have made so that the result of the game would have been favorable to our pretensions.

However, the above is unfair. Not because "something else is with guitar", but for the simple fact that 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 for that he should have been left-footed; if we made that change before, we would have given away the control of the ball to the opponent and that could have been worse; to have faced and been successful in that, he should have a technique that he doesn't have (something that we from the U suffered every weekend). The alternative scenarios we imagine are not the only possible outcome and many times they are not even achievable.

This addiction to "what if" is not exclusive to soccer. In public policies it is a daily occurrence and the current debate has been full of these exercises: "Why wasn't the quarantine decreed before?", "We should have made the contracts with this laboratory and not with that one", etc. While many of these criticisms have merit, they do not consider that in order to make them they took more information than was available at the time (or as they say in soccer "with Monday's paper"). For example, not recommending the use of masks at the beginning of the pandemic, or considering that children were "super contagious", which was corrected after the experts were able to gather more data and studies.

Others are simply fictitious and are not consistent with the options available at the time. In the local case, some have criticized having signed contracts with Sinovac and not with Moderna or Pfizer, on a larger scale. It is true that the vaccines of these laboratories have shown greater efficacy than Coronavac (a topic that we exposed in our previous column^[1]), but given the sanitary and geopolitical conditions, that scenario was not possible. The counterfactual, as our neighbors and most of the 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 no vaccine at all, at least for me, I am not lost.

Notwithstanding the above, this should not be a consolation. In this and other debates, counterfactuals should 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 the 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 left unused on another. For the time being, we can only continue shouting at the screen (or at the field, when we can), trying to imagine scenarios in which everything goes well. Or well, at least better.

 Nathan Pincheira| Chief Economist of Fynsa

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