The death of economic historian Angus Maddison (on 24 April 2010) deserves noting.

In a low-key way, Maddison transformed the economics of growth. The historical statistics he gathered so painstakingly over decades of work gave economists the long runs of data covering many countries needed to test growth theories against the evidence. He paved the way for the recognition of the role of human capital, the phenomenon of conditional convergence, and endogenous growth theory in general. Maddison opens my last book, The Soulful Science, and I included some charming stories about his career taken from an autobiographical essay he wrote. He also gave us the word “chiffrephile”, lover of statistics. There is an obituary by his colleague Bart van Ark available too.

Maddison's own books are available from the OECD Bookshop. Anyone who wants to know GDP per capita in China of 100AD or Portugal in 1485, or Germany in 1870, needs them. The World Economy website describes the work and has a nice dynamic graphic on long run growth.

I came across a blog post elsewhere reviewing a new book about visualising statistics, Dona Wong's Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics.

The review is lukewarm but the post has a lot of other links to several books about graphs, including the peerless Edward Tufte. Coincidentally I'd just been recommending to a friend Tufte's poster showing the famous Charles Joseph Minard graphic of Napoleon's doomed Russian campaign.

One book I really like is Howard Wainer's Picturing The Uncertain World. It's about both doing the statistical analysis well and presenting it in the most informative and clear way. He also wrote A Trout in the Milk.

It's time for me to sort out the next batch of books to send for review in the books section of the July 2010 Business Economist, and I've also just written approving comments for a couple of books which I guess will be out early next year, so it seemed a good time for a roundup of what's new and forthcoming.

Just out are two must-reads. One is John Kay's Obliquity, a wise and entertaining – and also short and easily-digested – essay on the truth that the most important goals are always attained indirectly. I've written a review for The Independent, not yet published, which is why I haven't yet reviewed it here.

Another is Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, about the sub-prime scandal (here's an excerpt). It's been widely reviewed. I've not read this but expect it will be very good. He's a terrific writer and does thorough research. No book skewered 1980s finance as well as his Liar's Poker.

I'm looking forward as well to Philippe Legrain's Aftershock. It's a work of reportage illustrating the way the global economy is changing and the impact of the financial crisis on the balance of economic power.

David Smith, economics editor of the Sunday Times, has a new book on a similar theme out as well. It's The Age of Instability: The Global Financial Crisis and What Comes Next.

Also in the box are Banking on the Future: the Rise and Fall of Central Banking by Howard Davies and David Green; Awakening Giants: Assessing the Economic Rise of India and China by Pranab Bardhan; Stephen King's Losing Control, reviewed here a while ago; The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, edited by a distinguished cast of economists, David Landes, Joel Mokyr and Will Baumol (there's a Wilson Quarterly essay by David Landes about it); and on a lighter note, The Cartoon Introduction to Economics by Yoram Bauman (the Standup Economist) and Grady Klein.

As for the forthcoming titles, one is by Roger Backhouse on The Puzzle of Modern Economics, which assesses the state of the subject in the light of recent events; and The Heart of Teaching Economics by Simon Bowmaker, in which he interviews the best teachers in US universities to find out what knowledge they're passing on to the next generation of economists. Backhouse's previous book was the excellent history of economics, The Ordinary Business of Life, while Bowmaker edited Economics Uncut, a very accessible intro to economics for students.

In the past five years I've done a lot of work via my consultancy Enlightenment Economics on the economic and social impacts of mobiles in developing countries. This has included supervising reports (commissioned by Vodafone) on mobiles in Africa (2005) and on mobile transactions (2007) – both are available for download on the Vodafone website (scroll down the page). So I eagerly snap up any new publication or paper on the subject, and picked up on M-Banking: An African Financial Revolution from an article on Kenyan m-banking in the current edition of New African magazine.

The book, published under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, is based on more detailed country studies on Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. (These don't seem to have been published – no sign of them on the website.)

It has a lot of useful descriptive material and case studies looking at different approaches to m-banking in the three markets. It looks at infrastructure and market context including tax and regulation and market structure/competition. It also describes several different business models, and the judgments these involve about the potential market for m-transactions – how far towards the 'bottom of the pyramid' do the mobile operators and financial service organisations seek to reach?

I found some useful new material. One case study looks at a failed retail experiment (by Nakumatt in Kenya) using mobile vouchers, and the reasons for failure are interesting. There is also some fascinating survey-based material on trust and banking in the South African market. Another example is a useful discussion about the proportionality of regulation in applying Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering legislation in developing country markets.

Having said this, overall I found the book a disappointment. It doesn't do enough to draw lessons for either business or regulators from the descriptive material. Nor does it refer enough to the rapidly-growing literature on mobiles in general and m-transactions in particular. People interested in the regulatory implications of mobile banking would do better to start with our Vodafone report mentioned above, which sets out a pretty thorough analytical framework even though many markets have moved on since we published it three years ago.

OK, it's not about economics, but David Wolman of Wired sent me the new paperback of his book Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to email, the tangled story of English spelling. It's full of fascinating information about the history of this beautiful language.

The theme is the interplay between forces driving English usage towards standardisation and away again. Technology has played a key role in the swings of this pendulum over the centuries, from the days of parchment and quill to the printing press and now the internet.

The book includes, for example, the tale of Google's spelling function and the influence online activity is having on spelling and usage. Google can work out what you mean if you mis-spell or mistype a word, and makes it seem less scary by asking in a neutral way “Do you mean?” when it suggests the correct version. “In this way Google can be authoritative rather without being authoritarian,” Wolman writes. Interestingly, though, as Google wants to get people to the best search results, it has to go along with common mis-spellings. The black and white spotty dog called a dalmatian is spelt by most people as 'dalmation' – so Google will go with the latter. The Internet is moving us perhaps towards a simplified, instinctual spelling.

In short, this is a delightful book (or booke, or boke) for writers, readers and lovers of the language of Shakespeare (or Shaykspeare, or Shakspear). Technology and globalisation are making our language more dynamic, vibrant and rich than ever. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.