Commons

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.

Background

The term "commons" derives from the traditional English legal term of common land, also known colloquially as "Commons". However, while common land might have been owned collectively, by a legal entity, the crown or a single person, it was subject to different forms of regulated usage, such as grazing of livestock, hunting, lopping of foliage or collecting resins. In distinction, the term commons in modern economic theory has come to refer to the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, such as air, water, and a habitable earth.

A failure (tragedy of the commons) was a widespread metaphor of early economics, which came up in the 18th centuries. Early econonomic writers and scientists were supporters of the British Agricultural Revolution and Land reform laws and were in favour of unified ownership of the land. They tried to get rid of the traditional usage rights of the commoners and used the tragedy of the commons as a suitable metaphor. They quoted, among others, Aristotle's polemic against the Polis of Platon in the sense of "everybody's property is nobody's property" and respectively "the most common good is the least guarded". The conflict around the dissolution of the traditional commons played a watershed role in landscape development and cooperative land use patterns and property rights. Among others, pamphlets as of 1833 by William Forster Lloyd on herders overusing a shared parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze became part of the common wisdom in economics. The same concept is sometimes called the "tragedy of the fishers", because fishing too many fish before or during breeding could cause stocks to plummet.

Prague

Prague (/ˈprɑːɡ/; Czech: Praha, [ˈpraɦa], German: Prag) is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. It is the 14th largest city in the European Union. It is also the historical capital of Bohemia Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava River, the city is home to about 1.24 million people, while its larger urban zone is estimated to have a population of nearly 2 million. The city has a temperate climate, with warm summers and chilly winters. Prague has the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union.

Prague has been a political, cultural, and economic centre of central Europe with waxing and waning fortunes during its 1,100-year existence. Founded during the Romanesque and flourishing by the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque eras, Prague was not only the capital of the Czech state, but also the seat of two Holy Roman Emperors and thus also the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. It was an important city to the Habsburg Monarchy and its Austro-Hungarian Empire and after World War I became the capital of Czechoslovakia. The city played major roles in the Bohemian and Protestant Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, and in 20th-century history, during both World Wars and the post-war Communist era.