"Economists have essentially no idea what is going on and
neither do their financial compatriots and the EMH is by
far the clearest example of this."
You only learn about EMH in first or second year in university; It is debunked in later years. It's like how you get taught first newtonian physics then later on when you're taught relativity, you learn that newtonian physics is not quite right but for many cases it is a good enough approximation.
"I shake my head in disgust at those who apply platonic and
unrealistic theories to the extremely complex system that
is the world. "
That is unfortunate. Markets are extremely interesting to study. A market is a powerful machine very good at resource allocation. It is the third example of how simple interactions can give rise to computational power. The first two being "evolution" and "the turing machine".
It's not quite behavioural finance but marginal benefits and marginal costs as applied to market efficiency.
From the author of the EMH in 1991, 21 years after proposing the EMH.
"A weaker and economically more sensible version of the efficiency hypothesis says that prices reflect information to the point where the marginal benefits of acting on information (the profits to be made) do not exceed the marginal costs (Jensen (1978))."
http://efinance.org.cn/cn/fm/Efficient%20markets%20II.pdf
