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The Banality of Neoliberalism...

1) Sloppy methodology:
--Let's take a gentle start. Even a lottery has real people winning it. If your methodology is to only examine the winners (and bypass the structure of the lottery system), then you can surely come up with some highly entertaining (and biased) results!
--The whole point of study designs/methodologies and statistics is to analyze the chaotic noise of the real world without getting distracted by certain human heuristics/biases (this does not mean we can avoid morals/politics, more later); see Ben Goldacre:
-I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
-Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
...In fact, Goldacre has a couple words on Gladwell:

On my left shoulder there is an angel. She says it's risky to extrapolate from rarefied laboratory conditions to the real world. She says that publication bias in this field [psychology] is extensive, so whenever researches get negative findings, they're probably left unpublished in a desk drawer. And she says it's uncommon to see a genuinely systematic review of the literature on these topics, so you rarely get to see all the conflicting research in one place. My angel has read the books of Malcolm Gladwell, and she finds them to be silly and overstated.

--Here's a revealing interview of Gladwell as a salesperson rather than a serious social theorist, study design be damned (emphases added; source: ):

The A.V. Club: Your books all focus on singularities—in The Tipping Point, singular events, in Blink, singular moments, and in Outliers, singular people. Was there a single instance in your life that made you start seeing the world in terms of single points?

Malcolm Gladwell: I just think I'm attracted to those kinds of singular things because they always make the best stories. I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories, so I've stuck with it ever since. And if you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual, so you're quickly weaned off the notion that you should be interested in the mundane.

...My definition of "mundane" (banality) features salespeople (con artists?) pretending to popularize social theory while actually just selling quirky stories that conveniently re-enforce status quo myths.

2) A First-World, Middle-Class Fantasy:
--"John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." -Ronald Wright
--Onto morals/politics: the real-world lottery system, with its violent conquests, inherited wealth, abstract contradictions and social struggles are whitewashed into a bland, apolitical marketplace composed of competitive automatons each trying to maximize their personal gains/utility, culminating in a meritocracy.
--On this edifice, we see the heaps of First-World glossy-covered self-help (The 4-Hour Workweek), pop-psy, pop-econ (Freakonomics), and business books to make the target audience feel more professional/self-accomplished.
--Of course, this system (capitalism, state capitalism, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it) has to work for some given its ceaseless mobilization of wage labour generating tremendous surpluses to extract from. The question is to what degree competition and meritocracy exist (not to mention the perverse consequences, let alone alternatives).
--Gladwell's storytelling features some highly political figures (Gates/Skadden/Oppenheimer); we have firmly stepped outside of cute marketing gimmicks and quirky entertainment/sports stats...
--Sterilizing the politics from the story requires limiting the scope of analysis to make meritocracy ("10,000-Hour Rule" to gain world-class expertise) more plausible. This requires skimming off undeserving peoples, usually starting with a national/colonial bias (by assuming the US/First World) and then certain classes/social groups.

--However, the system of capitalism is global; that was the whole point of colonialism, the slave market, the "coolie" market that replaced slavery, and today's transnational corporations and institutions (World Trade Organization, World Bank, IMF) backed by the US military to maintain capitalism's imperialism. Many poor countries are perfectly embedded into global capitalism, being the most "open for business" for transnational corporations their resources, dump their pollution, and (crucially) prevent alternatives ("Red Scare", "War on Terror", etc.): The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
...Global capitalism features social dislocation, be it:
i) Booms of financial speculation/gentrification (And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future) and jobless growth (Capitalism: A Ghost Story), or
ii) Busts leaving behind rust belts and mega slums (Planet of Slums).
...Thus, there's always enough dispossessed poor people to exploit (tens of millions of preventable deaths each year under global capitalism is somehow normalized), just as there's always enough environment to exploit (well, until that collapses: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).

--Curiously, the US (in particular the book's "middle class" target audience) is more and more experiencing the spatial (global) and temporal (boom/bust cycles) nature of capitalism that have ravaged the Global South.
--The most destructive war in human history (WWII) was the "creative destruction" that saved global capitalism from the endless Great Depression, with the US as chief creditor/arms dealer. The post-WWII boom built the US "middle class" with the US as the factory of the world; this lasted only decades before it collapsed under contradictions (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance).
--The US's next "creative destruction" was to smash its unions and factories (outsourcing) to unleash Wall Street's Finance Capitalism, resulting in the past 40+ years of global booms/busts while parts of the US were left with Rust Belt deindustrialization, opioid crises, precarious work, mass homelessness and uninsured, etc.
--Without a clear understanding of the profit-seeking spatial/temporal logic and disruptions of global capitalism (indeed abstract, where long-term power hides), those disillusioned with the status quo are susceptible to scapegoating, symptomatic explanations targeting the visibly-different and vulnerable. Hence, "global Trumpism" repeating the history of fascism which arose during the Great Depression. Vijay Prashad elaborates:
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--Accessible resources capitalism's abstract contradictions:
-Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present (including alternatives!)
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
-Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

--On a more positive(?) note, search up "Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator" and look at all the fashionable book covers and subtitles:
-My Retirement: What Super-Trendy Book Buyers Like Yourself Are Paying For
-Subtitles: How Secondary Titles Inflate a Sense of Importance
-Vague: The Power of Generalization to Impress the Bored
...and my favorite:
-Nothing: What Sandcastles Can Teach Us About North Korean Economic Policy