Criticism of 'Market Efficiency'...but does it allow you to make money hand over fist?

Art Carden is a professor of economics at Rhodes College and the following paragraph is from his write-up, Why Economics is Crucial for Ethics.

“If you are making money hand over fist exploiting inefficiencies in the market, then I will believe you and listen to your criticisms of efficient markets.  Until then, I've seen nothing to suggest that markets are systematically inefficient in a knowable, predictable way.”

Active investors generally believe that ‘pricing inefficiencies or anomalies’ can be predictably & consistently exploited in stock markets....especially in the so-called more ‘inefficient’ emerging markets (such as India).

I believe, that no market can be perfectly efficient i.e.at all times and for all people...this implies that even if inefficiencies exist in the market, they are randomly scattered such that no individual can ‘outperform’ the market averages (by profiting from those anomalies) except for random chance!

To my mind, the practical implication of Art Carden’s observation is:

In a market (e.g. Indian stock market) that has the presence of thousands and thousands of professional active investors (MFs, FIIs, PMS Managers, analysts, stock pickers, treasuries, insurance companies, advisors, family offices, and institutional investors etc)-it is rather difficult for me to believe that individual professionals can keep outperforming by consistently exploiting the mistakes of their equally brilliant and motivated counterparts.

In other words, for an individual (s) to consistently exploit inefficiencies, profit from them and thus beat the market...their counterparts (also highly motivated investors trying to generate alpha) have to consistently turn CHARITABLE and allow others to ‘consciously’ win.

However, even if we believe markets are not efficient, then, in Jack Bogle’s words, (from his interview dated 4^th January 2011, Money Magazine...Investor’s Guide-2011)

You don't need the efficient-market theory to justify indexing. Indexing wins whether markets are efficient or inefficient. In an inefficient market, a good manager may be able to win by five percentage points a year over a decade.

But by definition, a bad manager must lose by the same amount. It all has to average out. So even if the market is very inefficient, the index will still capture your share of the market return.

Link to the interview,

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/31/pf/investing/jack_bogle.moneymag/index.htm