Looking for some reviews or comments of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success I found an old post in Freakonomics from Ian Ayres that reminded me of a speech of President Obama that I had the privilege to hear. Ayres declares that his favorite Obama quotation is the one that serves as a title in this post. It is hardly my favorite but I find it inspiring.
I am not specially interested in personal success per se but in the factors that make countries succeed. What part of the differences between countries can be attributed to cultural factors?. Can we be confident that promoting hard work ethics we are going to see some non-negligible results on the development pattern of a society?. Maybe my favorite quote is not from Obama but from Jared Diamond: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”.
Publicly Economic 
I would enlarge your list of questions with some (impertinent?) additional points that have always worried me:
– Besides the importance or not of work ethics in development, is there a unique concept of development? Let’s be more provocative: is it suitable to promote a model of development inspired in a way of life that would need four and a half planets per person if everybody lived like me (unfortunately this shameful personal ecological footprint is true)?
– What about work ethics? The post that you mention talks about one of Gladwell’s main thesis: “[I]f the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?” Fair enough. But it also mentions a Chinese proverb which, apparently, is also in line with Gladwell’s thought: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich”. I am afraid that the persons who rise before dawn 360 days a year (to dignify the “work ethics”, I guess) can be awake in the evening to enjoy the house high on a hill. I still concede a certain importance to hard work in some developing countries but I suspect that this conventional wisdom is less pertinent for the societies in which I have always lived (Spain, US, France…). It misses some other important facts and it hardly fits into recent evolutions in the labor market.