Why does active asset management still exist?

At U Chicago, I was confronted with the paradox of 1) being at the intellectual ground zero for the efficient market hypothesis while 2) being at the vocational launching bad active investment managers. And yes, it was the same people in both classes.

Robin Hanson talks (briefly) about why index funds have not taken over the world:

Even employees who invest for themselves tend to pick at least one high fee intermediary: an active-management investment firm. Few take the low cost option of just directly investing in a low-overhead index fund, as recommended by academics for a half-century.

Whatever the reason, this is why the recent spate of Roboadvisors have come to the fore (that, and their very slick websites).

Looking at my own portfolio, I see lots of index funds, and the effort to patch together international index funds back when that was hard to create, plus strange situation specific hedges (REIT, Muni Bonds) and a handful of experiments (BP, Greece, Fannie Mae bonds).

Certainly time to rationalize it all, but tricky to do without triggering a lot of capital gains.