Chang didn't say that economists "weigh in" on political questions. He said some of their concepts are implicitly political and therefore not strictly scientific or objective.

My main criticism of economics is a hypothesis. It's a partial way of explaining how American capitalism is perpetuated. I don't need to support the hypothesis by delving into unreadable economic texts because a division of labour is possible. I don't regard the criticism as a necessary truth or as a well-established law. It's an explanation that differs from the conventional one that takes economics to be a science in good standing. The Great Recession undermined that presumption, as did the Great Depression much earlier, and I'm just filling in some blanks in the question, "What would the world look like if orthodox economics were largely a fraud?"

Examples of the sly economists, though, could be found in the documentary Inside Job. All the ones working for the major American banks that contributed to the 2008 real estate bubble would be propagandists, too, in downplaying the risk or in pretending their math were as solid as Einstein's.

Likewise, the economists in the 1990s who pushed for free trade as part of Western economic imperialism were cheerleaders for American superpower, not objective modelers of social reality. They recommended globalization on the pretense that it benefits everyone or that it makes the world a better place. But that was bullshit, not science. And the global populist backlash against neoliberalism is the fallout from that globalist fraud. The "liberalization of trade" meant that the poor countries should open themselves to being exploited by the rich, not that the former should build themselves up with socialism so that they can enter the global field as equal players with the rich countries. Of course, the rich countries built themselves up in the first place not with liberalized, fair trade but with rank imperialism. China thus has grounds for deeming the Western economists hypocrites.