I think you're putting too much faith in the authors of the excerpts. It's not like the authors have actually identified a statistical pattern that can be shown

I think you're putting too much faith in the authors of the excerpts. It's not like the authors have actually identified a statistical pattern that can be shown in data. It's not like this article gets written when some pattern emerges. It's just a dumb and lazy trope to throw out whenever an author wants to moan about kids these days. It's based on stupidity, nothing more. The first except is written today, in the UK, whilst the unemployment rate is at the lowest level in recorded history. There's literally a quote in there from 1916, The middle of World War 1, are you honestly going to say there was a major crisis of Brits being lazy and unwilling to work hard in World War 1?