Why Have Smoking Bans Caught On So Easily?

Even in Ireland and Italy? And why, meanwhile, are bans on things like file-sharing failing so miserably? Henry Farrell at the Crooked Timber blog argues that smoking bans succeed in large part because prevailing societal norms about smoking — e.g. “That Irish people can smoke in pubs to their hearts’ content, and that others will just have to put up with it” — were much weaker than we thought. After all, he writes, “state enforcement capacities are obviously insufficient to push something like this through.” [%comments]