[jerf]

Highly efficient != totally efficient. If you think you have some place where you know the market is inefficient, and you are right, you can go make money. (Or rather, your counterpart in the financial world will.) Now the market is that much more efficient again.

I think people citing the fact the market isn't totally efficient aren't always proving what they think they are proving. The practical difference for the vast bulk of us between a market that is totally efficient, and one that is only mostly efficient but it is very very hard to find the inefficiencies, is pretty much zero. I often see people try to leverage this into the idea that markets are efficient as somehow being "touchingly naive" to score political points in various political fights, but, well, there's a reason you have to reach for that emotional trick, because the facts don't really support the idea of some grossly inefficient market in practice. (Instead, the problem is that efficient doesn't mean what you think it does; it certainly doesn't mean "good" or "moral" or "stable" or anything like that.)