The biopolitics of global health: Life and death in neoliberal time

Abstract

The opening years of the 21st century have witnessed the rise of ‘global health’ as the preferred label for attempts to govern the health of the global population. In this article, I locate the epistemological origins of global health in the introduction of the Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY) metric in the World Bank’s Investing in Health report. I argue that the DALY metric accomplishes an economization of life by disaggregating lifetimes into component units of time and reassembling life as a revenue stream to be maximized through practices of self-investment in one’s own health – configured here as human capital. Life is reimagined as time and the individual as a neoliberal homo oeconomicus: as an entrepreneur of the self. I argue that the DALY metric is best conceived as a biopolitical technology of power that underpins the contemporary neoliberal global health regime.