Global Health and Biopolitics: Daly and Neoliberal Governmentality in Health

This essay aims to present and discuss the indicator called Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY), an important metric in health economic evaluation, relating it to trends in our contemporary neoliberal governmentality. The main task will be to go through the paths chosen in the process of the indicator's conception, taking the opportunity to indicate some statements of justification for this conception. We believe that the DALY can serve as a kind of beacon on the paths that a neoliberal rationality, which has proven to be dominant in our contemporary western social fabric, has taken when looking at life and health from a prism of the productive capacity of individuals. From a perspective based on Foucauldian studies, by explaining the choices made in the elaboration of the indicator, we also hope to point to mechanisms of knowledge-power operating at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.