People like me have become, over the last ten years or so, obsessed with a little-discussed metric that, perhaps more than anything, encapsulates the housing deficit that has arisen over the same period. That number is the average household size, the number of persons in the typical household. Its calculation is pretty straightforward, compared to measures such as gross domestic product (or indeed modified GNI, which we now use in Ireland) or even unemployment. Tot up the number of private households and divide the number of persons living in private households by that number. Seven or eight decades ago, the…

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