Fama on Taleb

From French and Fama's website:

Q: It would be very enlightening if you would comment on the Nassim Nicholas Taleb ("The Black Swan") attack on the use of Gaussian (normal bell curve) mathematics as the foundation of finance. As you may know, Taleb is a fan of Mandelbrot, whose mathematics account for fat tails. He argues that the bell curve doesn't reflect reality. He is also quite critical of academics who teach modern portfolio theory because it is based on the assumption that returns are normally distributed. Doesn't all this imply that academics should start doing reality-based research?

EFF[Eugene Fama]: Half of my 1964 Ph.D. thesis is tests of market efficiency, and the other half is a detailed examination of the distribution of stock returns. Mandelbrot is right. The distribution is fat-tailed relative to the normal distribution. In other words, extreme returns occur much more often than would be expected if returns were normal.

There was lots of interest in this issue for about ten years. Then academics lost interest. The reason is that most of what we do in terms of portfolio theory and models of risk and expected return works for Mandelbrot's stable distribution class, as well as for the normal distribution (which is in fact a member of the stable class). For passive investors, none of this matters, beyond being aware that outlier returns are more common than would be expected if return distributions were normal.