Nursing a migraine today? New research shows you’re not alone. More than a quarter of Americans suffer daily pain, a condition that costs the U.S. about $60 billion a year in lost productivity. And how often you’re in pain depends largely on the size of your paycheck. Americans in households making less than $30,000 a year spend nearly 20% of their lives in moderate to severe pain, compared with less than 8% of people in households earning above $100,000, according to a landmark study on how Americans experience in pain. The findings, published Thursday in the British journal the Lancet, also found that participants who hadn’t finished high school reported feeling twice the amount of pain as college graduates. ‘To a significant extent, pain does separate the classes,’ says Princeton economist Alan Krueger, who authored the study along with Dr. Arthur Stone, a psychiatry professor at Stony Brook University. Krueger notes that the type of pain people reported typically fell on either side of the rich-poor divide. ‘Those with higher incomes welcome pain almost by choice, usually through exercise,’ he says. ‘At lower incomes, pain comes as the result of work.’ Indeed, Krueger and Stone found that blue-collar […]