On the few occasions that I have encountered Professor Michael S. Akpan personally, I have always been struck by his evident sense of humility, meek mien and unassuming disposition. Yet, when it comes to economic discourse, the gentle lamb can quickly transform into a ferocious Lion with an intimidating roar. Like the confident scholar, Professor Akpan does not shy away from controversy; indeed he revels in scholarly argumentation and rigorous academic disputation. This much is evident in his inaugural lecture delivered at Bingham University, where he is Professor of Economics and a former Dean of Social Sciences, on Tuesday, October 21, 2025.
Titled ‘Being an Economist: The Homo Economicus’, the inaugural lecture ranges widely across diverse issues, ideas, concepts and characterizations as regards economics as a discipline and man as the veritable economic species. Professor Akpan commences his lecture with an interesting juxtaposition of two perceptions on economics as a subject by two renowned economists. First, was Professor Sam Aluko who famously described Economics as “a very simple subject deliberately made difficult”. Second was the assertion by Ben S. Bernanke in 2004 that “Economics is a very difficult subject. I’ve compared it to trying to learn how to repair a car when the engine is running”.
It would appear that the lecturer casts his lot with Bernanke as he recalls that in response to a student’s question, he had stated that “economics is truly difficult. But that it requires critical thinking and a measure of discipline to study it successfully”. But he does not interrogate why Sam Aluko depicted economics the way he did and even some of Professor Akpan ‘s analyses in the lecture insinuate that a number of the models and abstractions utilized in economic analysis tend to complicate and obscure reality thus making the subject less easy for many students to comprehend?
Can it be that the aspiration not just of economics but also most of the social sciences to approximate as much as possible the approaches, methods, categories and classifications of the natural sciences this creating the illusion of greater scientific rigor has diminished much of the value of the social sciences as analytic modes of studying and explicating different parcels of social reality?
Professor Akpan ‘s inaugural lecture is not a dry piece of abstract theorizing that lulls the audience or the reader to somnolence. Rather, we have the offering of an academic deeply steeped in theory but also has recourse to a wide range of lived experiences across time and space that enliven his sometimes abstract discourse. ‘Get out of your cloistered ivory towers and live’!!! the great novelist and short story writer, Cyprian Ekwensi once admonished some academic critics who had lampooned his literary works. Professor Akpan, as this inaugural lecture amply shows is as much at home in the abstract world of economic model building as he is in the practical economic terrain of running economic institutions, organizations, and structures to achieve goals both of productivity and development.
In his meticulous manner, he states the four purposes of an inaugural lecture and strives to ensure that his lecture conforms to his format. The purposes he adumbrates are “To showcase one’s research and expertise; to show one’s contribution to public discourse; to share one’s insight in a subject and to introduce one’s future research interests”. The lecture indicates that, as a trained economist, Professor Akpan sees himself as homo Economicus’ par excellence. He explains to his audience that “the homo Economicus’ is also known as the economic man, and for the purpose of this lecture, he is an Economist because he is started his economics with managing the pots in his kitchen”.
Continuing, Professor Akpan describes the economic man as “a theoretical model of human behavior in economics” and points out that “an economic model is a simplified theoretical and sometimes economic statistics or economic mathematics construct designed to represent a complex system or a complex process, e.g. a model house, a model aeroplane, a model ship or a model factory etc. This means a model is stripped to the barest but has important features of the object it is representing”.
From this premise, he identified five attributes of homo Economicus’ which are major characteristics or features of the person he is representing. Thus, he deduces that the homo Economicus’”is always acting to maximize his profits and utility by minimizing his cost; he is a rational being who always makes decisions and acts rationally at all times; he is self-interested and self-centered, motivated always by egoism and acquisitiveness; he has a short-term outlook – everything of his is now or never and he has a perfect knowledge of what he wants to do in his kitchen and in the markets as a producer, supplier, buyer, seller and consumer”.
Of course, Professor Akpan is not unaware that the concept of homo Economicus’ or economic man, which he traced to Adam Smith, father of modern economics, has “come under damaging attacks by the behaviourist economists and their followers who are now questioning the truism and validity of his attributes, his existence and even the real life examples of him. In other words, they are asking whether the real man has the economic man’s attributes. There are also feminist economists who have taken a swipe at Adam Smith and are asking why he did not create the economic woman”.
The lecturer also refers to the 2014 inaugural lecture in economics delivered by Professor Abdul-Ganiyu Garba at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and titled “Economics: A Discipline in Need of A New Foundation” in which the lecturer questions the very notion of the existence of the economic man. According to Professor Akpan, “From the results of his metaphysical analysis, the homo Economicus’ obviously failed the existence question and on the basis of the man’s existential failure, Professor Garba asked the question: “Does the homo Economicus’ exist? He listed four evidences of the man’s failed existence as follows: (1) Real humans have a diversity of motives and intentions; (2) They act irrationally; (3):They are inefficient and (4) They select adversely and sometimes are helped to choose because they are unable to rank alternatives or choose a satisfactory option”.
Nevertheless, Professor Akpan, if I am right, defends the notion of the economic man as a creation of the classical economists with its central economic thrust predicated on Adam Smith’s observation of man’s economic attributes which suggest that the economy is self-regulating making sustained unemployment impossible because”If it occurred by Chance, it would last for a short while because, in the long run, the system will self-regulate it back to full employment due to the self-interest of the economic man as a producer and as a consumer in the markets ( Goods and Services; Factors of Production: Land, Labour and Capital”.
Thus the lecturer unabashedly declared that the lecture was designed to “defend the Homo Economicus’, defend his economics and his creator, Adam Smith (1723-1790) and to present some selected publications of the lecturer, some of which have adopted the economic man’s economic concepts, assumptions and markets in their analyses”.
