Austrian economist who argued that recessions provoke "creative destruction"—failing firms leave the market, capital decamps to more promising technologies and workers move to more productive jobs, yielding short-term pain and long-term gain. He did not argue that politicians should deliberately engineer downturns, but nor did he think they should try to prevent them. "Depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress," he wrote. "They represent something which has to be done."
A landmark paper in 1994 by Ricardo Caballero of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mohamad Hammour, then of Columbia University, found that recessions could indeed purge outdated or unprofitable techniques and products. Other work at the time found that the Depression helped push out small, unproductive car factories, paving the way for mass production. In 2022 Daniel Bias of Vanderbilt University and Alexander Ljungqvist of the Stockholm School of Economics discovered that startups born in a recession outperform those which emerge in temperate periods—they are more likely, for instance, to list on public exchanges.
From 1300 to 1800, economic historians estimate that England and then Britain were in recession almost half the time. In the 19th century the country was in recession only a quarter of the time. Today recessions have become rarer still: aside from a contraction owing to covid-19 lockdowns, the world economy has not suffered a synchronised recession for over 15 years (as of late 2025).
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the combination is locked up in the safe.