In his new book Doing Bad by Doing Good, George Mason University economics professor Christopher Coyne argues that it is mistaken. His analysis shows that each of the three main types of humanitarian action either fails entirely or accomplishes relatively little good for the resources committed.

Readers of Regulation will not be surprised at the reasons Coyne gives for his conclusion: government programs are run by people who do not recognize their own knowledge constraints, don’t usually learn from their mistakes, don’t consider the perverse incentives they create for the people they are supposedly helping, and who often have incentives of their own that do not dovetail with their humanitarian missions. Those are, of course, the same reasons why domestic policy measures intended to help the poor fail or even prove counterproductive. In sum, Coyne has taken the Hayekian and “public choice” insights that explain the defects in programs such as government job training and applied them to their international analogues. Much as we are inclined to judge humanitarian actions by their good intentions, he insists that we think realistically about what they accomplish and suggests that those who are truly interested in helping poor and suffering people around the world should look for nongovernmental avenues for doing so.

Men of system | Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations about the type of person he called “the man of system,” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess board.” Coyne finds Smith’s observation about these blinkered, arrogant individuals to be pertinent to his topic and refers to the type who runs international humanitarian programs as “the man of the humanitarian system.” Those people believe that suffering can be relieved or prevented just as we managed to put a man on the moon: it is merely a technological problem that can be solved, provided that we devote enough resources and exert enough will. They are mistaken but, unfortunately, humanitarian programs have fallen almost entirely under their sway.

Out of every dollar the U.S. government devotes to humanitarian aid, only about 10 cents go for relief following disasters such as famines, earthquakes, and tidal waves. The rest goes to “developmental aid,” which is to say, spending on projects meant to enable native peoples to enjoy a rising standard of living through economic growth. Coyne argues that it is a terrible allocation of resources because disaster relief, while often wasteful, at least does some good. Developmental aid, per contra, is mostly squandered. The programs are administered by those “men of the humanitarian system” who seldom see that their ideas about what the local people need are different from what the people themselves would do with additional capital. For instance, the men of system usually assume that more formal schooling for children is a high priority, so they build schools and measure success by the number of boys and girls enrolled. The problem is that formal education is often a low priority for the natives and putting resources into it is wasteful.

Several of Coyne’s illustrations of failed development projects come from Afghanistan. One particularly good example relates to a dam in the Helmand Valley that would provide farmers with more water. Unfortunately, Coyne writes, “those who planned and implemented the program never asked how farmers would deal with the significant inflow of additional water.” The officials in charge, both western and Afghan, blithely assumed that the farmers would know what to do with more water, but as it turned out, they didn’t. Their fields were flooded and crop yields decreased.

The “experts” responsible for the project were still well paid for their time. The adverse effects fell upon the poor locals. Because the experts bear no costs when they’re wrong, Coyne argues, they keep making the same mistakes over and over.

In the field of development economics, there is a long-running battle between those who argue that external aid is essential to catalyze growth in poor countries, and advocates of a rival view (associated mostly with the British economist Peter Bauer) that such aid is harmful because it props up obstructionist governments. Bauer argued that free trade policies would be much more beneficial than foreign aid in helping poor nations develop. Coyne sides with Bauer and says that humanitarians ought to push for the elimination of trade barriers rather than supporting the development aid status quo.

Disaster aid | What about disaster relief? Shouldn’t we send food when people are starving and medicines when they face epidemics? Coyne doesn’t argue that we should throttle our impulse toward generosity, but he points out that such aid is not likely to accomplish as much good as we think.

One reason is that disaster relief aid is often of the wrong kind or delivered to the wrong place. What Americans witnessed with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s bungling of aid following Hurricane Katrina was illustrative of international efforts. Coyne notes a study of drug donations in response to the 2004 tsunami that devastated coastal areas of Indonesia. The study found that 70 percent of the medicines had labels in foreign languages that could not be understood by local medical practitioners and had to be discarded. Some 600 tons of medicine had to be destroyed, at a cost of $3 million.

Moreover, disaster aid can have the effect of rewarding the rulers for policies that cause and sustain crises. North Korea, for example, has been using the widespread hunger of its population to leverage aid from the United States for many years.

R2P | The third part of humanitarian intervention is military, i.e., using land, sea, and air power to fight against state-controlled violence that threatens innocents. Under the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine, the United States, other nations, and the United Nations have sworn to use their military power whenever necessary to prevent “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.” In 2011, President Obama invoked R2P to justify American intervention in the Libyan conflict that eventually led to the ouster and killing of Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi.

Coyne does not delve into the serious legal and moral issues that R2P raises, but considers only its practical problems. Military humanitarianism, like its peaceful siblings, “can never do merely one thing,” he writes, “because there are a series of unpredictable consequences over time and space that emerge from any single intervention in a complex system.” One of those unpredictable consequences is “blowback,” retaliation against the citizens of the intervening nation by people who were on the disfavored side of the conflict.

Another undesired effect of R2P may be to actually encourage violent opposition to states. Coyne cites the work of political scientist Alan Kuperman, who argues that it “creates a form of insurance for potential substate groups considering rebellion because the international community has indicated that it will, in principle, intervene to stop genocidal violence.”

Thus, much as we abhor organized violence abroad, we shouldn’t think that military intervention intended to stop it will have only the desired effects. The 2012 violence in Mali following the fall of Gaddafi in Libya is a reminder of that.

Privatizing aid | Doing Bad by Doing Good presents a depressing picture of the results of the work done by the “men of the humanitarian system.” Therefore, what should people who want to alleviate suffering do? Coyne argues that we’ll do far more good for those we want to help if we move away from state humanitarianism and toward private, non-state efforts.

One form of non-state humanitarianism is money remitted to poor homelands by individuals who have emigrated and become comparatively prosperous in advanced countries. Remittances sent by Haitians living in the United States to families and groups in Haiti do an enormous amount of good, Coyne points out, because the money is targeted and does not have to first pass through the sticky fingers of bureaucrats. If the United States allowed more immigration from poor countries, we would indirectly but efficiently help to relieve poverty.

Coyne also observes that for-profit businesses have been very effective in providing aid after natural disasters in the United States and says that humanitarians should put aside biases they may have against the help such businesses can provide. That’s undoubtedly right, but then he leaves this point dangling: since natural disasters often hit countries with weak business sectors, how can those countries benefit from the superior ability of profitable enterprises to help afterward? Haiti doesn’t have Walmart and Home Depot. Is there a way for such firms, perhaps with donations from American citizens, to avoid the local kleptocrats and directly help the suffering people? If there currently is not, could such an avenue be opened? This seems like an opportunity for true humanitarians to channel some of their energies.

Finally, what about humanitarian aid in the cases of organized violence? Coyne doesn’t have much to say about alternatives to state action in those cases, but it’s worth remembering that Americans and others used to get involved voluntarily in conflicts they cared about. In the 1930s, for example, volunteers risked their lives in the Spanish Civil War and the Russo-Finnish War. If we abandoned R2P and its idea that governments must take responsibility, would individuals and voluntary associations find ways to act? I think so and hope that Coyne or other scholars will further explore that question.

Despite my few quibbles, Coyne is to be congratulated for a book that strongly calls into question the conventional wisdom that we must look first to government to accomplish humanitarian ends.