Macroeconomics - The Streetlight effect

Noah Smith has rips DSGE a bit of a new one.  Mind you, not as comprehensively and as thoroughly as John Quiggins in Zombie Economics (What?  You haven't read it?  You Must!), but its all the more savage because it is somewhat incidental to his main point, that a lot of modern Macroeconomics is politically motivated.

To quote

By contrast, it's pretty easy to make a DSGE model in which government plays no useful role, and can only mess things up. So what ends up happening? You guessed it: a macro literature where most papers have only a very limited role for government.

In other words, a macro literature whose policy advice is heavily tilted toward the political preferences of conservatives.

Is that bad? Not necessarily. If the facts had a well-known conservative bias - i.e., if the models that fit the data best were the models that implied no role for government - then that would just be too bad for liberals! Liberals would have to accept that their ideas were contradicted by the best scientific evidence available.

But I contend that in the case of DSGE models, conservative policy recommendations don't emerge because they come from the best models, but only because they come from the easiest models. Thus, the conservative slant of modern macro comes not from the weight of evidence, but from the combination of publication bias and the inherent unwieldiness of the DSGE framework.

In short, the reason that most conservative economists believe in the 'No Govt.  Rrrrrr' approach to existence is that the easiest models for them to work with is one in which there is No Govt.! 
This is pretty much exactly the same as the chap searching for his keys under a streetlight over here, even though he dropped the keys over there, since its much brighter under the streetlight...