Before Zohran Mamdani burst onto the scene of NYC politics with promises of cheap groceries, rent control, and calls to seize the means of production, his father, Mahmood Mamdani, was making important political contributions himself. The elder Mamdani’s work is more academic in nature and generally more interesting than the “free stuff” brand of left-wing politics.

In particular, Mahmood was decades ahead on one issue that other academics were getting extremely wrong in the 1970s — population.

In 1972, Mamdani published his book The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste, and Class in an Indian Village. The book started with a (then) controversial claim: ecologist and population doomer Paul Ehrlich was wrong.

The Population Debate

Ehrlich was catapulted to popular fame after the success of his provocatively titled book The Population Bomb in 1968. Ehrlich’s message was simple: the world was overpopulated. In his view, population growth would soon lead to mass famine throughout the world. His beliefs on this issue were so strong that he went as far as to claim England would collapse before the year 2000 due to food shortages.

Ehrlich’s message was popular, and he wasn’t the lone anti-population force. Around the same time, the United Nations formed its Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), and USAID also began taking on major population aid projects. The theory shared by these groups was clear — if countries want to develop economically, they need to slow their population growth.

In hindsight, we know much of this thinking was both wrong and dangerous. Overpopulation concerns amounted to nothing, and anti-natal policy ended up having devastating impacts in developing countries. The UNFPA’s first “population awards” were given to Indira Gandhi in India and Qian Xinzhong in China.

Both of these governments are now notorious for the coercive population policies they used to achieve the ends lauded by the UN. Both countries were engaged in aggressive campaigns of sterilization and compulsory abortion, with record rates of sex-selective infanticide. These terrible policies were no secret at the time: Nobel Prize-winning economist Theodore W. Schultz resigned his advisory position with the UNFPA in protest over these awards, calling them a “travesty.”

Relatively few voices in the academic world spoke out against overpopulation hysteria. Among those were some economists like Julian Simon and P.T. Bauer. Joining arms in that intellectual fight was anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani.

These figures aren’t exactly likely allies. Simon and Bauer could both be broadly construed as free market economists. Mamdani, on the other hand, is a political scientist and anthropologist who frequently publishes on the impacts of colonialism. Their shared humility, though, helped them understand Ehrlich’s error.

Mamdani’s Fieldwork

Mamdani’s 1972 Myth of Population Control examined one of the early notorious failures of attempted population policy: the Khanna study. The Khanna study was an attempt by the Rockefeller Foundation to test whether distributing birth control in rural India would reduce birth rates. Early results seemed promising: 90 percent of the local population favored free contraception. Yet birth rates did not fall. What explains this tension? Mamdani provides an answer:

But, in brief, there was only one reason for such behavior: politeness. As one of the villagers explained to me: ‘Babuji, someday you will understand. It is sometimes better to lie. It stops you from hurting people, does no harm, and might even help them.’

In other words, the villagers enthusiastically accepted the gift of birth control to be polite! Policymakers and social engineers believed the acceptance of these methods signaled acceptance of lower population growth. Villagers were happy to “help” researchers by accepting their gifts, but had no interest in using them. Why? Mamdani clarifies this early on in his book.

To talk, as Ehrlich does, of ‘overpopulation’”’ is to say to people: You are poor because you are too many. As this essay will show, people are not poor because they have large families. Quite the contrary: they have large families because they are poor.

But why would the poor want large families? The answer becomes clear through Mamdani’s interviews with locals. Mamdani gives one case which is particularly illustrative:

Milkha Singh has no desire to limit the size of his family. His reaction is again typical of the poor in Manupur: ‘You think I am poor because I have too many children. [He laughs.] If I didn’t have my sons, I wouldn’t have half the prosperity I do. And God knows what would happen to me and their mother when we are too old to work and earn.’

The commissioners of the Khanna study simply didn’t understand how different the context of rural India was. For Indians, children were necessary for help with daily work and for security in old age. Telling them they would be richer without children would be similar to telling Americans they would be richer if they didn’t invest their money. The proposition was nonsensical. 

Mamdani’s study succeeded by simply allowing the people on the ground to explain themselves. Distant bureaucrats focused on a “population approach to development” simply tried to replicate the conditions that existed in richer countries (like lower birthrates) under the mistaken assumption that those conditions caused growth. 

Centrally planned attempts to “solve” rural Indian problems without understanding rural Indian context naturally failed. As one review stated, the policies “have not had a major impact on people’s attitudes, practice of contraceptives, or the average fertility rate.”

Even if they had been successful, it’s unlikely they would’ve brought development. This result is explained well by economist William Easterly in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth. In it, Easterly examines several “development panaceas” implemented in the twentieth century, of which population control was only one. He points out, “the general wisdom among economists from these [population] studies is that there is no evidence one way or the other that population growth affects per capita growth.” In fact, for developing countries, the population growth slowdown in the late twentieth century was accompanied by an economic growth slowdown:

[P]opulation growth has slowed down by about 0.5 percentage point from the 60s to the 90s in the Third World. But, as we have seen, Third World per capita growth slowed down over the same period. Moreover, there is no association across countries between success at slowing population growth and success at raising per capita growth.

This is a terrible track record. Despite coercive policies that harmed millions of individuals, the societal impact was negligible for both the intended purposes: no reduction in population growth and no clear improvement in economic growth resulted from these programs. While China and India gather the most attention for the sheer size of their operations, campaigns of secretive, coercive, and unnecessary sterilizations are also recorded in Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Namibia, Canada and the United States, and as recently as this year. 

The rural Indians understood their own lives in a way that would-be developers simply didn’t. Economic prosperity cannot be engineered from the top down by changing certain parameters, as if the economy is simply one big equation. 

Mahmood Mamdani’s work helps to demonstrate the folly of central planning in the face of the complex realities of local communities. His son, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, should bring that same humility to his plans for the rest of the economy.