Across the world, in all cultures, the poorest people are those who have the most children. Does having many children make people poor? Or does being poor cause people to have lots of children? It's a burning question in the ongoing struggle over how to spend foreign aid money. Those who believe that population growth is the cause of poverty advocate family planning and population education programs. Those who believe that poverty is the cause of population growth favor direct economic aid, employment and capital investment. Take care of development, they say, and the birth rate will follow itself. Supporters from both camps came to the village of Manupur, in India's northern Punjab province, to prove themselves right. Manupur is nothing special. It is a typical Indian village, with a population of around 1,200 in 1950, mostly farmers. Its population is not well off, although their lives are slowly improving. New seeds, fertilizers and credit systems have helped quadruple wheat yields since 1950. In 1953, a team from the Harvard School of Public Health came to Manupur to test one of the first family planning programs in the world. world. They regularly visited all homes, took a census, recorded all births and deaths. They also informed people about modern methods of birth control and distributed free contraceptives. The Harvard team expected the birth rate to decline. The Punjabis were rural, poor and uneducated. They had an average of seven children per family. Many young people have migrated to the city to find work; those who remained inherited smaller and smaller plots of land. It is certain that if families knew how to avoid having so many children, they would have fewer children. The people of Manupur politely accepted the contraceptive foams and jellies. At the start of the Harvard study, their birth rate was about 40 babies per 1,000 people per year. Six years later, the birth rate had fallen slightly, to 37.7. But the birth rate also declined across Punjab, even where there were no family planning programs. Harvard researchers concluded that the villagers weren't so ignorant after all. Family size has always been controlled by crude methods such as abstinence and voluntary abortion. Growing prosperity led people to want smaller families, as children had less need to work in the fields or support their parents in their old age. Once that happened, birth rates declined. Modern contraceptives have helped them use them easier and faster.