There’s a quaintly terrifying cockney expression, usually delivered when some poor middle-class wuss has just reversed his Saab convertible into a fruit and veg stall or jogged a tattooed elbow in a pub. Turning slowly to confront his class oppressor, the rock-fisted, salt-of-the-earth costermonger or boozer inquires: “Wosser big idea, mate?”

This is an extraordinarily good question, not because of the wrecked stall or the beer slops but because, currently, the middle — or at least the reading — classes are full of big ideas. These are being delivered to them by a bunch of mandarins, usually American, whom I shall call, in honour of old Rock Fist, Wossers. In some cases no offence is intended.

This is a long-term phenomenon but the best current example is The New York Times hardback non-fiction bestseller list. The following books are up there: Freakonomics, The World is Flat, Blink, On Bullshit and Collapse. The first applies economic theory to almost every form of human activity, the second is about how everything is changed by globalisation, Blink suggests that we all know things without thinking about them, On Bullshit is a philosopher’s take on the debauching of language and truth by politicians and PRs, and Collapse is about why societies fail.

Each one, in its way, is about everything and attempts to transform our understanding of the world through a “big idea”.

It’s perhaps fair to make some distinctions here. Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner’s Freakonomics is pure gimmickry that hides hard economic reductionism behind irritatingly jaunty language. It just doesn’t feel true. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is an absurdity that doesn’t even sustain its own theory.

Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat is too Americentric to be convincing. On the other hand, Jared Diamond is a major thinker and Collapse is an important book, while Harry G Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is a little masterpiece. There are good Wossers and bad ones.

Of course, this is just the latest crop to make the NYT list. I could also include Happiness, Everything Bad is Good for You and Parallel Worlds. A harvest of the past few years would include Consciousness Explained, Who Are We?, The Universe in a Nutshell, Why Most Things Fail, Our Posthuman Future, The Tipping Point, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, In Search of Excellence, Re- imagine! and so on.

It seems that big non-fiction books, unless they are about sport or pop, have to be about everything. People used to talk of books that changed their lives; now readers should expect their lives to be changed at least once a week or demand their money back.

The most mundane reason for all this is publishing fashion. Ever since big science books took off in the late 1980s, publishers have been trawling the labs and colleges for new Wossers who could just about plausibly claim to be able to explain everything. Ideally they should have a snappy and/or paradoxical title to hand.

Even better, they should have a smart metaphor. An early example — but still, in some ways, the best — of this genre is Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. One thing this book makes absolutely clear is that the gene can in no way possible be selfish. And yet the idea of a mean-minded stretch of DNA was so insidiously potent that it actually conditioned the way that a generation of lay people viewed contemporary biology.

Malcolm Gladwell’s two massively successful “big idea” books both repeat this trick by providing misleading metaphors for a mildly interesting theory in The Tipping Point and a wholly nonsensical one in Blink. Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell, meanwhile, is based on a bizarre misreading of a quotation from Hamlet.

The important point about these titles is that they create an utterly false impression of what is actually in the book and a pernicious expectation of what these contents can do for you. In this, they closely match business books, one of the great Wosser sub-genres.

Tom Peters is the supreme Wosser in this area. He is the author of In Search of Excellence and Re-imagine!, neither of which can be anything other than therapeutically useful to a real businessman. But business people want, above all, a quick fix and that is what the business book aspires to provide. The trouble is, in business as in life, there are no quick fixes for anything. Nothing that any business Wosser offers is true for more than about 30 seconds, as any history of the past 10 years alone conclusively proves. In 2000, just as the stock market was about to crash, airport bookshelves were groaning with tomes telling us that share prices would rise like rockets for ever.