He believed that research should be used to develop knowledge that could be applied to policies in support of public interest and the disenfranchised in the face of private capital.
The family didn't follow any particular church, but often read the passages in the New Testament that discussed the ethical principles of Christianity, which held ideas of primitive socialism.
As a child, he almost died of the flu, and subsequently his family moved to Pasadena, California, in search of a healthier climate.
Later that year, he entered the Ph.D. Economics program at Berkeley, where he undertook a seven-year thesis on the East San Francisco transit system.
The shooting of picketers by the National Guard at the San Francisco Longshore Strike, and the plight of drought-driven farmers of Midwest during the Depression demonstrated to Smythe the vagaries of class struggle.
However, it was his concern for the Spanish Civil War and the citizens' struggle against fascism that led him to being involved with the American League for Peace and Democracy, which promoted education and political action to help lift the arms embargo.
The Smythe family moved to Canada in 1963, and Dallas found a job teaching Communication and Economics at the University of Saskatchewan for the next 10 years.
[4] A contemporary mention of Smythes concept of "audience commodity" is to find in a 2012 event and discussion between Jacob Appelbaum and Dmytri Kleiner about "Resisting the Surveillance State and its network effects" at the 2012 re-publica in Berlin.