On #1, I'd guess one factor is that the car isn't as big a part of teenage social life as it used to be. In much of the U.S., cars were central to high-school social life, with who had cars counting for a considerable amount of social status, and a lot of hanging-out activities (malls, movie theaters, arcades, etc.) requiring cars to get to. It's possible that also had advantageous effects for being able to get to jobs, but teenagers weren't mainly getting their licenses for those reasons. My read is that hanging out at the mall doesn't have the same role in high-school social life of the 2010s as it did in the 1980s.

1 Maybe they don't want to submit to draconian licensing restrictions which have trended politically toward the ridiculous and punitive under the guise of increasing road safety all whilst seniors losing their sense of sight continue to get involved in serious accidents on a regular basis? Not to mention the environmental / financial issues implicit in car ownership.

2. Maybe they don't see a need to migrate to places where physical presence is necessary to undertake these jobs when location independent work is a rising tide? (Thus further negating the entire point of having a car and / or submitting to the prior mentioned procedures from point 1?)

Speaking for myself those are the reasons I don't submit to the whole car culture thing and the reason I don't choose a location to live based on employment / economic factors, but then I'm 32, so I acknowledge I'm not generation Y. It stands to reason though that there are some people in that generation proceeding on the same basis as I am.

Boomers criticising any generation for not wanting to play the game strikes me as utterly hilarious. Especially from a guy with a book titled "Why you need and love the rat race". It's self parody at its finest.