[gehwartzen]

I think it can be a fairly reasonable viewpoint; there are many systems where "downturn" type events are good for the system as a whole and also disproportionally good to some members. A natural forest fire is good for the forest from time to time, good for certain well established individual trees, and good for future generations but of course terrible for those trees that get culled out.

[oblio]

The issue with this is that there's a lot of "culling" happening during these recessions. And people aren't trees.

[umvi]

Right but we aren't incinerating people during the culling. Very few (if any) people actually die compared to trees in a forest fire.

[oblio]

During recessions there's higher rates of suicides, divorces, depressions.

People don't have to die for their lives to be miserable.

(And people on HN don't have to be so literal or pedantic, especially when analogies are used...)