Perhaps think of it like a bank account, with positives being the deposits and negatives being the withdrawls. Some people strive to see their account balance go up up up, exclusively.
A poor person has likely experienced the deterimental nature of excessive withdrawls. A wealthy person has done their best to avoid them entirely.
My question is this: would you rather be poor or wealthy, figuratively speaking?
The cultural shift away from a reliance upon negatives towards a 'purer', more positive-style of training has allowed many individual dogs and some non-obedience breeds to become highly competitive in dogsports, who I suspect would not have been so competitive otherwise, under the old regime.
