Business-valuation

People often take jobs they know are dangerous, and indeed, our economies generally depend on their doing so. But is that by itself a justification for letting them? After all, maybe the answer would be to change our economies instead. This book is a knotty but fascinating attempt to look at this knotty but fascinating issue. The author, a political scientist of a technical bent, rejects the received view that high-risk jobs can be justified by the payment of higher wages. And indeed, in the book's best section, he expands his argument into a general critique of the cost vs. benefits analysis of the value of human life. Dorman notes that historically the marketplace has not produced even remotely efficient accommodations between risk-creators and risk-bearers. The mainstream economic approach fails because "risk in its publicly meaningful sense is not the bare statistical probability of suffering a loss; it is a violation of the norms of care and reciprocity that ought to govern relations among people."