I would liken the economic inevitability of contraction to wildfires in California.
For years, wildfires naturally occurred. Then some people got it into their heads that stopping and preventing the fires was a good idea. For a while, it worked. But nature demands a contraction of wood material into fire and smoke. So, when nature’s bill was due, “payment” had been put off so many times that the resulting contraction was enormous and more damaging than if the original fires had been allowed to perform their natural rhythm of collapse and expand.