Gideon Strauss was the first Cardus Senior Fellow. Economic cultivation, argued Strauss at the Ontario Art Gallery, is not child’s play. It requires practical wisdom, entrepreneurial imagination, and sheer hard work to build a business, to organize a trade union, to craft fiscal or labour policy. We live in a reality characterized by an irreducible complexity that is neither transient nor random. To develop economic wisdom, that is, to make practical sense of economic life amidst all of this complexity, we must pay attention to the trades of its enduring design.

Particular markets differ from one another as much as individual people do. To insist that there is one best way in which to cultivate a market, build a company, organize a union—that there is no alternative—is almost as deplorable as insisting that every human being should be blond, blue-eyed, and six feet tall.

But while every human being is a unique composition of chemical, biological, emotional, and moral elements, and while the human genome is immensely complex and took an enormous effort to decode, the basic building blocks and design patterns that make up the genetic information of a person are sufficiently simple that the human mind can form an idea of them.

It should be similarly be possible for us to trade the building blocks and design patterns of the human economy. Read Gideon’s entire address in the Best of Comment.