Most microeconomists I know think that microfounded macro models are a joke.
The sad thing about this is that fundamentally, the Lucas critique has a lot of merit. It's just that what macroeconomists used as "microfoundations" is basically a joke because, like you explain, they aren't true microfoundations.
Furthermore, even if the kind of aggregation that "microfounded" macroeconomics always does would lead to reliable predictions, there is still the issue that aggregation makes the hidden value judgement that issues of distribution and fairness don't matter. After all, when you aggregate, you only see the averages.
Part of the problem is that the important problems of economics - i.e., macro-economic problems - are genuinely hard[1], but public economic discourse acts happens as if much more were known than really is. When it comes to the economy, it's as if we were trying to fly to the moon without knowing about Newton's laws of motion, while at the same time there are powerful and wealthy interests trying to convince everybody that the earth is a disk.
[1] They're not hard in the sense that research problems in mathematics are hard; they're hard in the sense that there is a crazy number of hard to measure variables, there's no way to run repeatable experiments, and so on.
The sad thing about this is that fundamentally, the Lucas critique has a lot of merit. It's just that what macroeconomists used as "microfoundations" is basically a joke because, like you explain, they aren't true microfoundations.
Furthermore, even if the kind of aggregation that "microfounded" macroeconomics always does would lead to reliable predictions, there is still the issue that aggregation makes the hidden value judgement that issues of distribution and fairness don't matter. After all, when you aggregate, you only see the averages.
Part of the problem is that the important problems of economics - i.e., macro-economic problems - are genuinely hard[1], but public economic discourse acts happens as if much more were known than really is. When it comes to the economy, it's as if we were trying to fly to the moon without knowing about Newton's laws of motion, while at the same time there are powerful and wealthy interests trying to convince everybody that the earth is a disk.
[1] They're not hard in the sense that research problems in mathematics are hard; they're hard in the sense that there is a crazy number of hard to measure variables, there's no way to run repeatable experiments, and so on.