Such market failures can have deadly consequences when they involve workplace health and safety issues. Of course, market defenders argue that markets will, over time, compensate for such failures. Over time, employers will find it difficult to attract workers to dangerous jobs and, over time, employees will learn about the risks of every workplace. But this raises what we have pre-viously described as the first generation problem. The means by which the mar¬ket gathers information is by observing the harms done to the first generation exposed to imperfect .market transactions. Thus, workers learn that exposure to lead is dangerous when women workers exposed to lead suffer miscarriages and their children are born with serious birth defects. We learn that workplace exposure to asbestos or cotton dust is dangerous when workers die from lung disease. In effect, markets sacrifice the first generation in order to gain informa¬tion about safety and health risks.