That's not my impression of the criticism of agent based models and I don't think there's a criticism of the models per se. Computationally intensive models with heterogeneous agents are used in parts of macro (an office neighbor of mine in grad school was using these models to look at efficient taxation, for example).
They're not part of the core of macroeconomics because AFAIK they haven't been shown to do better than existing approaches at addressing the fundamental macro issues: the business cycle, monetary policy, forecasting, etc. (I'm not that familiar with the literature, so if there are key papers I'm missing I apologize).
I'm repeating this because HN seems to have a disproportionately high number of people working on agent-based models. If you're working on that stuff and you want to take over macro, give new insights on monetary policy. That will do it.
The issue is that there just isn't that much data. You collect a bunch of macro level time series variables. Ok now what? No matter how cool or sophisticated your model is, there is just too little data to tell which models actually fit reality.
The criticism I describe is what most economists tell me when I bring up agent based models. In practice they mostly just ignore the field.
That's probably a reasonable description for why most macroeconomists don't work on these models and wouldn't advise a student to start working on them, but if the models were giving new insights or understanding, people would pay attention.
They're not part of the core of macroeconomics because AFAIK they haven't been shown to do better than existing approaches at addressing the fundamental macro issues: the business cycle, monetary policy, forecasting, etc. (I'm not that familiar with the literature, so if there are key papers I'm missing I apologize).
I'm repeating this because HN seems to have a disproportionately high number of people working on agent-based models. If you're working on that stuff and you want to take over macro, give new insights on monetary policy. That will do it.