I’m sure this whole article comes as a shock to nobody, but it’s nice to see it recognised like this.
The bad things did not just happen, they were conscious choices or the inevitable consequences of those choices.
Which the authors then go on to explain in further detail, following the introduction. It’s right there in the sentence you cherrypicked that phrase out from:
An analysis of five factors — housing, healthcare, debt, tax, and income — reveals the age group is caught in a perfect economic storm.
Here’s my improved version:
An analysis of policy, formed by corporate interests and pushed upon the public in the 1980s, shows how it deprived the current crop of young adults of social housing, under-invested in public healthcare, enabled predatory lending practices, distorted the tax system so that a disproportionate amount fell upon the lowest three deciles of tax payers and hobbled unions while outsourcing manufacturing to the developing world causing earnings to plummet.
