Shane Hamilton
speaker
9 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Shane Hamilton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Freakonomics Radio · How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update) · 9 Dec 2024
podcast
Things like chicken breeding and hybrid corn took a outsized and somewhat surprising role in U.S. propaganda in the early 1950s. The farms race had an obvious winner.
After Sputnik, when the United States was trying to understand why it was falling behind in the space race, or why it thought it was falling behind in the space race, many of the commentators said, the problem is we're not funding basic research.
So after 1957, the budgets of not only organizations like the National Science Foundation, but also specific government departments like the Department of Agriculture, their budgets for research increased dramatically. on the theory that this is how the United States would win the Cold War, by doing the best science.
I'm a writer, editor, and historian.
And it really looks at the ways that science as an idea became a tool for propaganda in the Cold War, especially on the American side. There's this idea that you can change hearts and minds and you can establish a climate of opinion that makes people more willing to accept the American way of life as the better choice.
things like chicken breeding and hybrid corn, took an outsized and somewhat surprising role in U.S. propaganda in the early 1950s.
The United States wanted to promote personal exchanges, scientific and technical exchanges, as a way to promote American values. But at the same time, it was very, very nervous that by doing so, it would lose the advantages that it had, particularly in grain production.
A newspaper editor in Iowa named Lauren Soth invited Khrushchev to the United States to see the wonders of American agriculture.
And somewhat to everyone's shock, Khrushchev said yes. Now, Khrushchev didn't come himself until 1959. But in 1955, a group of 12 Soviet agricultural experts came to the United States to see the wonders of American agriculture. They saw how contour farming worked. They saw the wonders of hybrid corn. They saw the chicken breeders.
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