AP Photo

It was Liam Corrigan, a 51-year-old heating technician I met in Dublin, who made the point: “In the end, you really do have to ask yourself whether it was worth all the hype.”

He made good money in the 15-year boom and bought a five-bedroom house, only to watch the work dry up and his house disappear. Now he’s living in a rented apartment, earning what he did in 1994, as if the whole thing had been an odd and very Irish sort of dream.

Was it all worth it? Or are we all like Liam Corrigan? As the economy begins to recover, we ought to be asking whether the crash of ’08 wiped out all the gains, national and personal, that were created in the long boom. Or are people still better off than they were when it...