Return­ing from a trip to Europe, Nate Sil­ver—pro­pri­etor of the polit­i­cal analy­sis web­site FiveThir­tyEight—has promptly com­piled a list of obser­va­tions on Lon­don and Paris from an Amer­i­can point of view.

As an ‘insider’ it appears that I’ve take a lot of these grad­ual changes for granted, not really mak­ing any conclusions.

Lon­don, and the United King­dom in gen­eral, has sort of become ground zero for what is known as lib­er­tar­ian pater­nal­ism, with all sorts of sub­tle nudges to influ­ence behav­ior. For instance, cig­a­rette packs now con­tain not only the phrase ‘smok­ing kills’ in promi­nent let­ters on the front side of the pack­age, but also, a dis­gust­ing pic­ture of rot­ted teeth on the back­side (a prac­tice which is some­what rem­i­nis­cent of an Amer­i­can Psy­Ops oper­a­tion in Afghanistan). There is now a com­muter tax to drive into the city. Tube maps con­tain firmly-worded admon­ish­ments to rid­ers, advis­ing them to avoid chang­ing trains at busy stops like Covent Gar­den or Bank. Black cabs fea­ture doors that lock and unlock auto­mat­i­cally as the car begins to accel­er­ate. The amount of liquor in a cock­tail is strictly reg­u­lated (although this was true when I was there as well). Over­all, one is gen­er­ally more aware of the pres­ence of gov­ern­ment than one is in the United States, even though they have sev­eral free­doms over there (broader tol­er­ance for things like gam­bling and gay mar­riage for instance) that we don’t have over here.

via @zambonini