If you don't read you don't tend to learn empathy, or communication skills. In an age where so much of our negotiation with the world around us takes place online, if you can't read, you're in danger of getting locked out:

our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

From Neil Gaiman's lecture for The Reading Agency.

Sometimes someone hits an idea so sweetly to the boundary that you wonder how your society ever lost it in the first place.