David Lam: Breaking Through to the Other Side

by Susan Rosegrant

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On a plain wooden door in a long hallway on the first floor of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) is a plaque honoring David Lam with a classic line from a song by The Doors: "Break on through to the other side." The plaque was a gift from a group of ISR colleagues, and they meant it quite literally.

Ten years ago, when Lam, as director of the Population Studies Center (PSC), wanted to move Pop Studies into the Institute, ISR offered the center a good chunk of space on the first and second floors. Lam liked the layout, but there was no quick connection between floors: You had to take an elevator or walk to a more distant staircase. Lam asked why a door couldn't be cut through to the existing stairwell, but was told it was impossible. Lam didn't believe it. He asked again. Then he asked again. Finally, an architect consulted the 1965 building plans, and Lam got his way. The door, Lam adds with a laugh, has become very popular. "It needs a meter on it. I insist that it's one of the most heavily used doors in the building."

The plaque, using the Doors line to celebrate Lam's door victory, is apt in more ways than one. Lam, a fit 57-year-old with white hair and a moustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and a well worn face, has been breaking down barriers most of his life and he goes at it full tilt. Murray Leibbrandt, a South African economist who has collaborated closely with Lam for more than a decade, calls it the "Lam Package." When Lam went to do research at the University of Cape Town, he didn't just sit at a desk, construct a survey, and then pack up and write papers about the data. He got out in the field to see how people lived. He studied two of the local languages. He helped tailor the questionnaires to local circumstances. And he spent time tramping around with field workers. "Other influential academics have blundered into the country and gotten people's backs up," Leibbrandt says. "Here's the thing about David as a researcher. He's a very smart guy and he's world class, but he has no airs and graces about him."

Lam took a circuitous route to becoming one of the world's leading scholars in economic demography. But he doesn't regret the detours he took along the way. He grew up in Durango, Colorado, notable both for its rugged beauty and for the invisible line that divided the town—Anglos on one side, Mexicans on the other. Lam rebelled against that line and, as a teenager, threw his energy into studying Spanish and traveling to Mexico. At Colorado College he cobbled together a major in Latin American studies built around Spanish, political science, and anthropology.

Lam shared his fascination with "lefty" Latin American politics and travel with Tina, his girlfriend since high school and a fellow Latin American studies major. In 1972, at the age of 20, the couple married, quit school, and drove to Mexico. "We had this wild idea that we were going to drive this van all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America," Lam says. A car accident, a robbery, and running out of money all helped scuttle that goal. Still, the Lams spent a year in Mexico, and came back with their idealism and love of travel mostly intact. They had a son, Gabe, when they were 23, finished their degrees at Ft. Lewis College in Durango, and moved to Austin, where Lam began a master's in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas.

In high school Lam had enjoyed mathematics, for which he had a knack, but as an undergrad he had avoided it. "I had this sense math was irrelevant—why would you take this stuff?" he recalls. Then the graduate director of his program talked him into taking a course in the economics of Latin America. "I hadn't had any economics, and I didn't have any of the prerequisites for the course," Lam recalls. "But I took it and it was one of those why-have-people-been-keeping-this-from-me moments. This is what I should be doing! Then I had the zeal of the converted and decided economics was the way to look at everything." Lam went on to get a master's degree in demography and a Ph.D. in economics from Berkeley. In 1983 he became an assistant professor in economics at the University of Michigan and an assistant research scientist at the university's Pop Studies Center. (Tina, who had earned a master's in journalism from Berkeley, became a reporter at The Ann Arbor News and later The Detroit Free Press.)

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