At some point, every careful reader of this book will begin to wonder just who it was intended for. Certainly I had in mind specialists and practitioners in the fields I have sought to cover: labor economists, personnel and safety officials, union activists, government regulators, and producers and consumers of benefit–cost analysis. This would explain the literature summaries and the analyses of statistical evidence and formal economic theory. But what accounts for the story-telling, the excursions into philosophy and psychology, and the other digressions that recur throughout this text? What is the point?

The simple answer would be to say that I had in mind the elusive educated lay reader. But why would this individual, the target of so many works, turn to a study of the economics of occupational safety and the valuation of life? Not for practical reasons, certainly, since this work is the product of an economist, not an industrial hygienist, and it contains no useful advice for avoiding the hazards of the workplace. My hope, rather, is that readers from a variety of backgrounds will find this topic interesting in ways that transcend its immediate concerns, as I have. Not that the human dimensions are not compelling: I have gone to greater lengths than most writers on this subject to make the consequences of dangerous work explicit and immediate. Yet it is the combination of intellectual complexity and life-or-death significance that makes this topic truly gripping – it presents a series of vexing theoretical and empirical puzzles that we must try to solve.