Why governments should measure physical pain

Speaker: Dr Lucia Macchia

Abstract

Traditionally, the Gross Domestic Product has been considered the key indicator of societal progress and wellbeing.

Due to the limitations of the standard statistics, governments started to use measures of psychological wellbeing (e.g., happiness, life satisfaction) to evaluate citizens’ welfare.

More recently, scholars across the social sciences suggested that alternative approaches to measuring wellbeing should be taken into account.

This work argues that governments should consider physical pain when assessing societal wellbeing.

This talk will analyse physical pain as a socioeconomic, psychosocial and behavioural phenomenon and discuss why pain should be used to complement the existing measures of societal wellbeing.

Policy implications of physical pain will also be discussed.