A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read-
Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking "that's so insightful! that changes everything," but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you'll start searching for another book to fill the void.