I'm not reducing pareto optimality to anything. I'm elaborating on Chang's point. Economics needs to be amoral to be scientific. Yet economic issues are thoroughly moral/normative because they're social and political. Therefore, economic arguments are vulnerable to being abused: they tend to match up with the amorality that prevails in the top one percent, whitewashing unjust economic arrangements such as plutocratic distributions of resources.

Scientistic economics is like sophistry in that the sophist pretends to be neutral with her seemingly scientific tools, yet she ends up using them systematically to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor because the rich pay her salary. Pareto optimality is one of those tools. It's weak to the point of being vacuous, and it becomes useful only with fudging of the initial conditions. So it's perfectly suited for hacks and shills doing "statistics" as hired guns, spreading disinformation, as explained in agnotology.