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 all began?
What the Western world did in the 1990s was essentially try an experiment: We expanded loose money and easy credit more widely than ever before, allowing even poor people to borrow against future earnings, in hopes that this would create a sustainable improvement in living standards.
If we do it all over again, should we avoid that risk - or were there sustainable gains that made the volatility worth it? To formulate an answer, I enlisted the assistance of economic researcher Allison Martell, who spent the week scouring the latest economic statistics for North America and Europe.
First, we looked at earnings (in terms of actual purchasing power) of poor and lower-middle-class people. If you were in the bottom 20 per cent of the population, did the boom give you more purchasing power? And did you keep it?
In Canada, the answer is an unambiguous yes. The after-tax incomes of the bottom 20 per cent of Canadians had fallen slightly during the crisis of the 1990s, from $21,000 to $19,000 (in constant 2008 dollars); beginning in 1997, they rose steadily, to just shy of $24,000. Among the next highest 20 per cent, they rose from $32,000 to 40,000 - and, with both groups, the purchasing power of their earnings seems to have levelled off but not fallen.
The same was somewhat true in Britain, though incomes have fallen in recent years. In the United States, it's a different picture: After-tax earnings peaked in 2000, fell somewhat throughout the 2000s, and went off a cliff after 2008, dropping to 1997 levels (though not yet to pre-boom 1994 levels).
Another important index is home ownership: Did the boom allow more people to own their own property - and did the crash wipe out that important step into middle-class stability?
Statistics Canada's General Social Survey shows that home ownership rose from 65 per cent in 1993 to somewhere above 75 per cent in 2008 with a slight dip, of 4 percentage points, at the end. In the U.S., it rose from 64 per cent in the 1990s to 69 per cent in 2005, then slumped every year after that, back to 1999 levels in 2009. European rates have generally held steady, except in Ireland, where they have plummeted to pre-boom levels (some European figures aren't yet available).
But we should be wary: A study by the U.S. Federal Reserve last month looked at "real" homeownership, by discounting people who owe more than their homes are worth (and thus are unlikely to own them forever). That cuts the rate by 5.6 percentage points, killing most boom-period gains. We don't know these figures for other countries, but Britain, Spain and Ireland all have plenty of "underwater" mortgages, and Canada generally doesn't.
Indeed, the debt that made possible all those gains could end up undermining them completely. We looked at total consumer debt compared with income and, in almost every Western country, it rose sharply - even during the boom years, when incomes were rising. In the U.S. and Britain, debt went from 65 per cent of income in 1994 to almost 100 per cent in 2009; in Spain, from 40 per cent to 90 per cent; and in Ireland, from 60 per cent to 130 per cent.
The outliers were France and Canada, which saw debt rise less sharply, and Germany, where consumer debt has fallen since 1999. The answer is hard to avoid: In the countries that kept a lid on consumer and mortgage lending, the economic boom was worth all the hype. Everywhere else, it was like a bad dream.