Oh to be doing some last-minute summertime publicity for Nudge, the book that has become a must-read for Tory MPs and ambitious young Cameroons.

The tome - at the top of David Cameron's summer-reading list - about how to nudge or inveigle the public into making better choices has leapt to No 30 in Amazon's list of bestsellers; spectacular for a policy book written by an economist (Richard Thaler) and a law professor (Cass Sunstein). Its publishers, Yale University Press, are reputedly doing cartwheels around the office.

Good for Nudge. But there is a cautionary tale here, and one to which all aspirant salesmen of ideas should pay heed. Wonkish books occasionally hit the big time but their shelf life is often fitfully brief. How much influence can the authors of Nudge expect to wield in five years' time? Go to any second-hand bookshop and bear humbled witness to the debris of big ideas past, books which merited only a flicker on the attention span of the intelligentsia on their way to the bargain bin. Take these five examples.

The De-Moralization of Society (1995)

Books praising Victorian values have now been ruthlessly excised from Tory reading lists for fear of upsetting those free-wheeling metropolitan types who've been snubbing the party for years. Root around for long enough on the bookshelf of any Tory intellectual, however, and there's a good chance you will find a dog-eared copy of The De-moralization of Society.

Penned by the grande dame of New York conservatism, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the book was a trenchant historical defence of the Victorians against the charge that they were greedy and rapacious, and argued that we would do well to learn from their sense of self-help and moral virtue. It was duly fêted by right-thinking Tories on this side of the Atlantic. The problem was, it arrived at the fag end of John Major's Back to Basics campaign, when Tory MPs were being revealed daily as adulterers and avid purchasers of ladies' stockings. The project, along with the book, was quickly swept under the carpet. Like any seasoned wonk, however, Himmelfarb went straight back to the drawing board. Last year, she resurfaced with a paperback called The Roads to Modernity - and persuaded none other than Gordon Brown to supply the preface. Influence rating: 4/5

Sustainability rating: 1/5

Beyond Left and Right (1994)

Anthony Giddens, the former Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, made his pitch for wonkery with his book Beyond Left and Right in 1994. It was a leftish attempt to take seriously the demise of the Soviet Union and state socialism. It translated into plain English the ideas of German sociologists of risk, such as Ulrich Beck, and argued - quite perceptively, as it turned out - that if social democrats were to find a new voice they would have to talk less about providing public goods and more about preventing public bads. It quickly became the Das Kapital of new Labour's brainier young apparatchiks. After Labour swept to power in 1997, however, its strategists decided that sweeping ideologies were too much too abstract for people to engage with, and that everything should instead be reduced to what worked. The book slipped away to become part of the policy background - everyone now agrees with it, and so no one bothers to read it.

Influence rating: 4

Sustainability rating: 1

The State We're in (1995)

Who now remembers “stakeholding”? The idea owed its spell in the sun to Will Hutton's book, and was soon on the lips of every leftish policy wonk. The idea was about making society more inclusive for those on its lower rungs - businesses would be made more accountable to their workers via worker-directors, for example, and more power would be devolved to the regions. The idea was soon so influential that it was copied wholesale by Tony Blair for his book New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country the following year. Now, of course, it is a dead parrot of an idea, and hardly anyone mourns its departure. The problem was that, a little like new Labour's other policy conceit The Third Way, it seemed to mean very different things to different people. To the old Left it was a rallying cry for workers' power, whereas the Blairite middle classes were more interested in its quid pro quo of greater social responsibility - a new deal for the long-term unemployed, for example, on the condition they didn't steal our stuff. Influence rating: 3

Sustainability rating: 0

Connexity (1997)

Like any serious idea entrepreneur, new Labour's in-house wonk Geoff Mulgan knew how to set out his stall with a pithy new buzzword that captures the essence of a complicated idea while intriguing the reader enough to read more. In retrospect, however, he could have thought of something snappier than connexity. The book arrived in 1997, and was Mulgan's attempt to grapple with what the web and evolutionary psychology can tell us about our increasing connectedness as citizens. Connexity was all the rage during that brief period when centre-left politicians on both sides of the Atlantic convinced themselves that the internet was itself a political manifesto. Its demise can be traced to the day that Tony Blair was photographed holding two index fingers aloft a computer keyboard with no clue how to make the thing work.

Influence rating: 2

Sustainability rating: 0

Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005)

“On average,” Richard Layard claimed in Happiness, “people are no happier today than people were 50 years ago.” In the first of a slew of books that claimed to be able to quantify human happiness using scientific methods, the LSE academic argued that the relationship between rising incomes and greater happiness had been thrown out of joint - that our bigger wage packet made us no happier because our neighbour was also getting a flashier car. His follow- up argument was that engineering happiness should be the stuff of public policy, and his tome promptly set off a Mexican wave of happiness initiatives within government. Are we any happier as a result? It is, to quote a phrase beloved of policy wonks, too early to tell.

Influence rating: 5

Sustainability rating: n/a

James Harkin is the author of Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking

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