Sam Ashman is Associate Professor of Economics in the School of Economics at the University of Johannesburg. She acts as director of the university’s MPhil programme in Industrial Policy which is run jointly with UN-IDEP in Senegal and which aims to enhance the knowledge and capacity of African policy makers in the field of industrial development and policy. Sam is currently visiting the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford where she is working on a research monograph on the South African economy, exploring how and why it remains dominated by such remarkable economic, social, and environmental extremes.