Christopher J. Coyne’s claim that almost all humanitarian projects are ill-conceived, ill-executed, and ill-advised cannot fail to affront. After all, many thousands of Americans rush to help people hit by natural disasters and other overwhelming events.
Nor will it please U.S. government officials who justify interventions—including military ones—as essential for democracy, free markets, and human rights.
Whether in countries torn by civil strife, such as Syria, or ones shattered by an earthquake, such as Haiti, “what are the limits on what we can do?” asks Coyne, a professor of economics at George Mason University.
That is the key question that is too little asked, he claims in Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails, from Stanford University Press.
Coyne’s alternative approach begins with economic realities. Then, he says, you have “a ready-made framework” for more efficient delivery of aid and freer operation of markets that can improve conditions in developing countries, all while taking sober account of the economic and cultural conditions of peoples in need.
At George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Coyne is associate director of a research program named for F.A. Hayek, a winner of the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, whose free-market advocacy earned him acclaim from some and disparagement, for an authoritarian slant, from others.
On the phone, Coyne sounds far from authoritarian. He is empathetic to efforts to alleviate suffering. But he insists that while humanitarian assistance may provide short-term relief—food, medicines, shelter—it cannot promote societywide economic development. And without that, he says, wealth does not increase to a point at which higher standards of living can reduce vulnerability to disasters and emergencies.
Instead he advocates a “constrained” approach. “Instead of viewing societal development as something that is ‘created’ or ‘planned’ through aid and technical expertise,” he writes, “the constrained approach views development as an ongoing process of discovering new and improved allocation of scarce resources.” Above all, that amounts to pressing aid-receiving governments to clear the way for local businesses to form, grant land rights to farmers, suppress corruption, and cut waste. All those actions allow businesses to generate economic growth.
Of course, Coyne says, aid workers respond sincerely to fellow humans in crisis, but that motive often conflicts with the quest to win financial spoils from the huge aid industry. Delivering food to starving people is one thing, but Coyne questions exceedingly complex interventions that aim to rebuild entire political and economic systems.
Aid workers may object that they do recognize constraints because they battle them daily, while Coyne’s market theory amounts to market idealism. The author embraces any charge of thinking economically but also believes that many aid groups have lost their independence because of reliance on government money. He notes that in 2001, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to American nongovernmental aid organizations as “force multipliers,” while in 2003, then-director of the United States Agency for International Development, Andrew S. Natsios, bragged of telling NGOs that continued support from the agency would depend on their presenting themselves as “an arm of the U.S. government.”
Given all his doubts, Coyne sees only failure ahead at the prospect of Washington’s increasing its involvement in Syria. Military aid is going to rebels when “it’s far from clear” which are good and which bad. And, as in other U.S. incursions, civil, regional, and diplomatic fallout may outweigh the benefits. Reiterating his After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (Stanford, 2007), he asks: Where are the lines of responsibility and accountability? “Our government represents us, we harm people abroad, and you and I pay taxes that foot the bill.”
He is not alone in doubting the efficacy of state-led foreign aid. Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist with a master’s in government from Harvard and an economics doctorate from Oxford who has worked at the World Bank, voiced similar arguments in Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
She continues to plead with outside governments and institutions like the World Bank to cease, forthwith, lavish aid to African governments that fuels poor management and corruption, creates damaging dependency, and undermines growth. A better approach, Moyo argues, is to encourage emergency responses, charitable aid, and donations to on-the-ground charities. Stop requiring, as the United States does, that most aid food be purchased from American rather than local farmers.
Similarly inefficient, agrees Coyne, are American subsidies, tariffs, and barriers to free trade and free movement of labor across borders. On those scores, he says, “we speak out of both sides of the mouth. We care about poor people, and provide money as well as food and shelter, but then pass policies like those.”
Criticism of aid policies, practices, and outcomes surfaced as early as the 1960s, with Peter Bauer, the Hungarian-born economist much admired by Margaret Thatcher. The critiques have been coming thick and fast. Before Moyo’s book came the New York University economist William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Not only economic rationalists sound alarms. From the political and academic left has come suspicion stoked by policy makers’ use of terms like “nation building” and “counterinsurgency.” Randall Williams, author of The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), argues that current ways of framing humanitarian aid and human rights “consistently reinforce the interests of the West, and more specifically the United States.”
As hasty military campaigns are mounted, “missionary zeal” obstructs alternatives, says Williams, an independent scholar in ethnic and cultural studies.
In its hawkishness, the “universalist notion of humanitarianism” recalls earlier imperial rationales, he contends.
Neda Atanasoski, a specialist in women’s studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, agrees. In Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity, forthcoming in December from Minnesota, she assesses humanitarian discourse in novels, films, and other cultural artifacts, including political and military rhetoric. For example, she says in an interview, what goes into creating “authorized modes of violence"—ours—against those modes of violence that are cast as arbitrary and authoritarian? How would one define a “good life” that forgoes Euro-American models?
While Williams questions “humanitarian hawkishness,” Atanasoski wonders about a form of feminism that embraces military intervention at the service of “tolerance,” sexual freedom, and an end to sexual subjugation.
“Do Muslim women need saving?” asks Lila Abu-Lughod, a Columbia University anthropologist, in the title of her Harvard University Press book, due in November. The Western focus on abuses of Muslim women is itself disfiguring, she has argued. It is a rhetoric that encourages foreign interference and invasion, and new variants of colonial thinking. She suggests that religious strictures often harm various populations of Muslim women less than the poverty and authoritarianism generated by Western nations’ actions, such as a quest to “save” them through violence.
