COBE Global Capitalism speaker to explain reasons humanitarian actions often fail

Christopher Coyne

Christopher Coyne

Christopher Coyne, the director of graduate studies of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, will be the featured speaker at the Radford University College of Business and Economics (COBE) Global Capitalism Distinguished Speaker Series event Monday, Nov. 11. The event is sponsored by BB&T and the Charles Koch Foundation.

Coyne's talk, "Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails," begins at 10 a.m. in the COBE Building room 320. His speech comes from his recently published book of the same title.

The professor's presentation is free and open to the public and is the seventh in the Global Capitalism Distinguished Speaker Series. The series is an ongoing collaboration between BB&T and the Radford University College of Business and Economics to stimulate thought and discussion about capitalism, the tenets of free enterprise and the best practices of successful organizations.

Coyne is an associate professor of economics and F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason. He also is the North American editor of "The Review of Austrian Economics." In 2008, Coyne was named the Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics, and in 2010 he was a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center at Bowling Green State University.

Coyne is the author of "After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy" (2007, Stanford University Press), "Media, Development and Institutional Change" (co-authored with Peter Leeson, 2009, Edward Elgar Publishing) and the editor (with Rachel Mathers) of "The Handbook on the Political Economy of War" (2011, Edward Elgar Publishing).

Coyne joins a distinguished group of previous speakers who have participated in the BB&T-COBE series: Hamid Ghanadan, founder and president of the Linus Group; Mary Rose Carosia and Theresa Werner of S&P Capital IQ; Kevin Daley, a past vice president at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and founder of Communispond; former BB&T Chair and Chief Executive Officer John Allison; Jason Bingham, vice president, Central Territory of North America, for Ingersoll Rand; and Keith Shields, senior statistician and analytic development lead for Marketing Associates in Detroit.

For more information about the Global Capitalism Distinguished Speaker Series, call the COBE office at (540) 831-5187.

Nov 5, 2013