You can trace the generational divide to this. The issues it creates long term in terms of economic inequality are very visible.
It's been identified as generally anyone over 47 being significantly better off than anyone under 43, with us Xennials between 43 and 47 being a mixed bag caught in the middle.
(Weirdly if you count 2008 as the beginning of the end, then that also puts 2012 as the end of the end which is the other date really cite).
It's essentially whether you had bought a house before the crash or not. If you did you got more value for money and easier access to a mortgage and therefore weren't as exposed to issues over housing. You are less likely to have had to rent for so long, you are less likely to get caught out by leasehold issues, you are less exposed to issues with stagnant wage growth and the due to when the crash fell (looking at the average age you bought a house in 2007) the numbers of people going to university meant a degree wasn't as important so you didn't have the debt from that either and you had better opportunities if you didn't have the education as you could still start a good career without one.
This also lies along a technology line - Gen X are identified as have an analogue childhood whilst Gen Y are the digital generation.
Again Xennials get stuck in the middle of this. There's a few of us who as early adopters were part of a first wave of understanding how bad the internet was/is but also understand how beneficial it's been to our lives too. So we cross the boundary again between older people who still don't understand the internet and younger people who don't understand life without it.
It's no one thing. 2008 really was the point where the errors of the then Labour government began to become very apparent.
Not preparing and foreseeing the crash (when it was visible incoming from the moon). Not understanding the implications of fifty percent of people going to university with no thought or investment in the other fifty percent. Not taking the revolutionary nature of the internet seriously enough - I was having lectures in 1998 about this. The only public figure I saw say it would be a revolution was a certain David Jones (his interview from the time really stands out on the subject). These are three key issues.
You also get the rise of leasehold ground rent issues starting around this point - you councils refusing to adopt estates so you start getting service charge issues too. They don't really exist for estates built before 2004 but by 2007/8 they were starting to become the default. You also have the impact of poor planning decisions hitting. There was a trend for small ftb homes forced by government policy which led to developers only really building large family home to maximise profits - no thought was given to 'second tier small homes'. We now face issues relating to this as wage to housing price ratios mean families can't afford big houses anymore whilst boomers want to downsize meaning ALL the pressure in the market is on the very type of home that wasn't being built in the late 90s to 2010s. This is one of the reasons we have a 'housing crisis'. We have a shortage of the right type of house not simple a shortage of housing. But it goes back to policy decisions made at this point.
And please do not get me started on the disaster that is PFI. We should have just borrowed more as it'd have been cheaper in the long run and maybe some public services now would have been more fit for purpose. But it made the books at the time look better than they were.
You also have pension issues which go back even further (to the 80s) but by 2008 - 2012 they were starting to have an impact as the boomer generation started to retire. Final Salary Pension schemes were in their death. By 2004 more than 60% had closed with most of those remaining following shortly after. The oldest boomer's were 65 in 2011. Demographically they are the biggest generation in terms of numbers and therefore voting power, so you see a shift away from the most important voting cohort from being workers with income to pensioners with fixed assets. This political has shifted focus away from the interests of the working population. It's a major change in policy focus for political parties chasing votes. It makes it much more difficult politically to address the triple lock. And of course 20 years down the line, the loss of FPS to young people and the unaffordability of Final Pension Schemes has become much more noticeable combined with the stark affluence of those who benefitted from them.
So was the 90s through to 2010s a golden age? I think it was an age of massive errors, mistakes and poor planning we overlook because it was a period of better economic times. It's harder to hide these same type of errors when the economic outlook isn't so great. Many of these errors were fucking obviously going to be long term disaster zones and many people did voice these concerns at the time but were drowned out by those who were after short term gain.
With the benefit of hindsight it really doesn't look as good as you initially believe when you actually start to THINK about it.
I don't think technology is the primary course of problems. I think it brought significant changes that we didn't really well consider but the biggest issues we have now are much more basic and entrenched in other areas of political decision making which are far more traditional and aren't as easy scapegoats. If you are part of the boomer generation it's easier to look to blame technology change than decisions made during your earlier life. If you are part of generation z technology is of course sacrosanct because you don't know any different and it's easy to blame everyone older than you rather than come up with reasonable workable solutions (perhaps because you don't have the life experience to understand the difference between wishful thinking and how the world is interconnected).