Two in five Americans didn't read a single book last year, abandoning the one habit billionaires explicitly tell them is the secret to wealth. As someone who consumes a management book a week while crushing my morning cold plunge, I view this as a personal insult.
The data crossed my desk this morning, and frankly, I was appalled. According to the latest figures, forty percent of the country—and a staggering majority of Gen Z—failed to complete a single book in 2025. This is not merely a cultural tragedy. It is a fundamental rejection of the social contract. For decades, the wealthiest men in the world have generously provided a foolproof blueprint for escaping the middle class, and it seems the middle class has simply decided it cannot be bothered to read it.
The best founders I know do not just read; they weaponize literature. I recently had an omakase lunch with a prominent venture capitalist who told me he reads five hundred pages a day. Does he have a staff of fourteen managing his calendar, his children, and his properties so that he may sit in a sunroom digesting Marcus Aurelius? Yes. But the point is the discipline. By refusing to engage with the written word, the average worker is spitting in the face of the executives who took time out of their busy yacht schedules to explain exactly how they achieved greatness.
We are repeatedly told that Americans are too exhausted to read. They cite the headwinds of inflation, the demands of holding multiple gig-economy jobs, and the mental toll of a crumbling healthcare system. This is a classic victim mentality. When I was building my third B2B SaaS platform, I was also incredibly busy. Yet I still found the time to listen to Ray Dalio's Principles on Audible at three-times speed while my driver navigated traffic on the 101. If you cannot find twenty minutes a day to optimize your personal runway, you do not deserve equity.
I have zero patience for the argument that modern life has engineered reading out of the daily schedule. If you have time to stand in line at a food bank, you have time to open a PDF of The Lean Startup on your smartphone. The sheer arrogance of assuming your immediate physical needs supersede your long-term cognitive development is exactly why so many people remain trapped in the lower tax brackets. You are choosing comfort over capital.
What deeply concerns me is the structural impact this intellectual laziness will have on our corporate ecosystems. Billionaires swear by books because books teach you how to think in systems, how to identify synergies, and how to ruthlessly eliminate inefficiencies. If the labor force stops absorbing these lessons, how can we expect them to understand the necessity of their own right-sizing?
When a company announces a strategic pivot that necessitates eliminating three thousand roles, a well-read employee understands the macroeconomic beauty of the maneuver. They have read the Harvard Business Review case studies. They appreciate the elegance of the balance sheet. An illiterate employee, however, simply gets angry about their mortgage. This lack of intellectual sophistication is a massive drain on human resources.
When employees read biographies of great industrialists, they learn to accept mass layoffs as a necessary chapter in a visionary's heroic journey.
Without that shared literary foundation, managing the underclass becomes a logistical nightmare. Just last month, I implemented a mandatory reading program for my entire engineering team. I assigned them a seven-hundred-page history of the Standard Oil monopoly to help them contextualize why we were freezing their annual bonuses to fund our new AI pivot. Instead of recognizing the historical parallels of our shared sacrifice, they complained that the book cost thirty dollars and that they were tired.
This brings me to the profound economic injustice being perpetrated against the thought-leadership community. Do you have any idea how much it costs to hire a former Wall Street Journal reporter to ghostwrite a two-hundred-page hardcover about how waking up at four in the morning builds character? It is a significant capital expenditure. When two-fifths of the country simply opts out of purchasing these vital texts, it destroys shareholder value across the entire publishing sector.
When I released my own book last spring, Disrupting Empathy: How to Lead When No One Else Matters, I envisioned it as a lifeline to the very people who are currently struggling to pay rent. I priced it at an incredibly accessible thirty-five dollars. Yet, my publisher informed me that ninety percent of our sales came from bulk corporate purchases meant to sit unread on lobby coffee tables. The working class completely ignored a masterclass in wealth generation that I dictated into my phone while waiting for my helicopter.
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars manufacturing a compelling narrative about how skipping breakfast makes you a disruptive genius, and these people are just watching TikToks instead.
The lasting consequences experts are warning about are already here. If the public stops believing that reading is the magic key to becoming a billionaire, they might start looking for other explanations for our success. They might start scrutinizing our tax rates, our inheritance structures, or our offshore holdings. The myth that a library card is the only difference between me and a warehouse worker is the load-bearing pillar of modern capitalism.
This is why I am urging the government to intervene. If Gen Z will not willingly consume the memoirs of eccentric tech magnates, then we must make it a condition of their employment. We need mandatory corporate book clubs where the failure to articulate the core thesis of Shoe Dog results in immediate termination.
I am currently halfway through a magnificent biography of Andrew Carnegie. It is a thrilling tale of a man who understood that true progress requires breaking a few strikes and crushing a few unions. It has given me unparalleled clarity on how to handle the impending unionization vote in my fulfillment centers, and I truly wish my warehouse staff had the intellectual curiosity to read it with me.