Steven A. Sass – författare

The private pension is a curiosity in the modern economic environment. Why do profit-seeking companies pay retirement benefits to those no longer on the job? In this new institutional history, Steven Sass explores the rise and growth of the financial support system that today commands trillions of dollars of investment capital and supports hundreds of thousands of older Americans.Before 1900 America's elderly derived their livelihood from simple sources. They worked if they could, relied on their children, and took charity if necessary. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the country was constructing a new industrial economy. Both laborers and capital were moving away from farms toward large corporate establishments. These market changes weakened family links and traditional skills, rendering workers more vulnerable to economic shocks. The elderly, in particular, fell out of step with the new mechanized and bureaucratic regime. It was in response to these dramatic economic shifts that the institution of private pensions emerged. In return for workers' long-term loyalty, employers promised to help sustain them through old age.As Sass shows, creating the pension system proved far more complicated than anyone had anticipated. Over the last hundred years it has evolved into a complex institution driven by congressional mandates, judicial/administrative decisions, union campaigns, political debates, and the ministrations of lawyers, economists, human resource specialists, actuaries, and insurance experts. Sass traces the U.S. pension system through to the present day, exploring how our modern corporate economy is confronting the challenges of an aging population.

As prominent as the Wharton School of Business is today, so was the Wharton family in the mercantile world of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Nineteenth-century scion of this large and wealthy business family, Joseph Wharton amassed a huge new fortune in his American Nickel Company and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and through these enterprises helped catapult the nation into the modern age of industry. In 1881, while still in mid-career, he contributed part of his accumulated wealth to endow the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania. Wharton's purpose was to prepare the city's young men "of inherited wealth and capacity" to assume control of the complex economy that he and his fellow entrepreneurs were then creating. He would have the university provide that cultural background needed by all gentlemen of society, while the new Wharton course would instruct students in those economic experiences necessary for success in the world of practical affairs. Wharton's investment and instructional program began the modern tradition of collegiate management education.Steven A. Sass's The Pragmatic Imagination not only provides a history of the world's oldest and still one of the most prestigious schools of management but also offers a fascinating exploration of the interaction of higher education and economic activity. The volume illuminates the essential tension in professional business education-that between utilitarian training and scholarly speculation-and analyzes the various regimes of conflict, accommodation, and synergy between these two interests. Providing the unifying theme of the history is Joseph Wharton's ambition to create a leadership class for industrial America. Careful attention is devoted to the various strategies adopted to achieve this end and to the forces that facilitated or frustrated the founder's purpose. Essentially an essay on the role of authority in the development of American culture, The Pragmatic Imagination carries the history of Joseph Wharton's experiment from its origins in the ironmaster's entrepreneurial ethos; through the vigorous Mugwumpery of the 1880s; to the gospel of the Progressive Era of civic revival and practical education; into the crises of depression and war; through the flowering of econometrics and operations research; down to the present-day vogue for the M.B.A.