The trumpet, the Democratic Party, the pandemic, and wage dynamics

Today Mr. Perepè delighted us with another of his pearls :

Incidentally, I've learned that when Mr. Perepè ventures into quantitative fields that are difficult for him, following his long-standing tradition (the one that led him to frequent the #goofy to learn the craft of "true sovereignism"), he has his comments corrected by community members, which (and this is good news) constitutes a movement of thought directly within religion, since we have our own Judas! Just to give you an idea of ​​how complex and multifaceted the human soul is and what inscrutable and unpredictable forms friendship and gratitude take. I say this is good news because, obviously, as a religion, we could compete for the 8×1000 tax return. However, you know there's a technical crux (the crucifixion of the prophet) that continues to perplex me, so for now we'll make do with what we have…

But let's get back to the point, or rather: to the points, which are two, one technical and one political.

Let's start with the technical side, because that's where we see the inconsistency of Mr. Perepè, whose squeals increasingly sound like the burping of an economic infant. The framework for his grotesque outburst is the one created by the 2025 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook , and specifically by this infographic:

which you can find here , an infographic that the information operators of the media-judicial complex, and their useful idiots , i.e. the "sovereignists", have jumped on because it contains an outlier (anomalous data) that is very useful for the anti-government defeatists: that celestial diamond at the bottom, at -8%, which is precisely the data to which our favorite useful idiot refers!

Allow me a political digression into this technical discussion: supranational organizations, just like the media-judicial complex, just like the Democratic Party, are our class enemies. Their purpose is not to provide data, but to sway public opinion against patriotic forces. Therefore, just as one should vote against anything proposed by the Democratic Party (even leaving the euro!), one should view with extreme suspicion any suggestive image emanating from such entities (which in a better world should be suppressed sic et simpliciter ). This is especially true in this case, as we will see when analyzing Mr. Perepè's burp.

The first thing Mr. Perepè gets spectacularly wrong is the definition of the variable. If real wages had decreased by 8%, we'd actually have a serious problem! The charming useful idiot (how can you not like a Parrot like that?) gets at least two things wrong:

1. It fails to report the temporal frequency of the data: we are talking about real wages on a quarterly basis. This clarification is not trivial, because the quarterly data, even when adjusted for seasonality, is affected by cyclical fluctuations, meaning it is less inertial. Therefore, an 8% drop on a quarterly basis could correspond to a much smaller fluctuation on an annual basis, and on the other hand, an 8% drop on an annual basis in real wages, which are a significant portion of GDP, as you should know , would imply a more or less proportional drop in GDP, meaning a recession worse than the one experienced during Monti's reign. Needless to say, there is none of this in the data, and why?
2. Because Pappagone Perepè fails to specify that the real wage measure he's referring to is the hourly wage! Real wages, in fact, mean the total wages divided by a measure of inflation, and these, on a quarterly basis, increased by 9.8% between 2021Q1 and 2025Q3, as you can easily verify from the data:

Speaking (seriously) about wages, we've already noted that there are at least a couple of visible discrepancies depending on the denominator used to calculate average unit wages in real terms. The trend is indeed very different depending on whether employed persons or hours worked are used:

There are two visible differences: one trend-based and the other cyclical. On a trend basis, we see that throughout the entire period before the crisis, as well as during and after it, hourly wages increased more than wages per employee. In other words, this means that the number of employees increased more (or decreased less) than the number of hours worked, or, if you prefer, that the number of hours worked decreased more (or increased less) than the number of employees. Indeed, if we indulge our curiosity and see how the number of hours per employee has evolved:

We will note, without great surprise, that it has tended to decrease from 433 hours in the winter of 1996 to 391 in the winter of 2013, remaining in that range until the pandemic crash ( more on this later ). The data doesn't surprise us: it roughly corresponds to the transition from a 7.2-hour to a 6.5-hour working day (the overall average for employed workers), as a result of the progressive precariousness of employment relationships, with involuntary part-time work , etc. These are things we know, and trends we have reversed.

But what interests us here is the visible economic anomaly caused by the pandemic! As you can see, with the pandemic, due to the lockdowns , the number of hours per employee plummeted to a low of 323 hours in the spring of 2020. I hope the reason is clear to you. It's true that historical memory built on extemporaneous events, like the injection, is more fragile than others, but I think you'll recall that during that period, a certain category of people (particularly public employees) were kept at home and paid for (not) working, while others (private sector employees) were provided with ample redundancy payments (CIG), because the political option had been to confine themselves, and the victims of the lockdown couldn't starve. Naturally, the hours of redundancy payments (CIG) aren't hours worked, and this explains the collapse in hours per employee.

Now, you will remember that in the semiological analysis of this blog, made at the last goofy:

the most illustrious opponent (in the sense of Greimas) is undoubtedly our friend Uva, but, as Acquarelli notes:

just as our narrative foresees more than one actant (the Promethean actant Bagnai, who brings the fire of science to brutalized humanity – you – but also the collective actant community – always you! – who intervenes chorally), at the same time it foresees more than one opponent, and the spectrum of opponents is broad:

Institutional adversaries, such as the so-called troika (European Central Bank, European Commission, and International Monetary Fund); scientists, neoliberal economists, and anti-Keneys (the so-called "Bocconi" ones, first and foremost); media outlets deemed misinformed or, at worst, collusive; and the left, understood as a political camp at the Italian and European levels, which, according to Bagnai, has failed to understand that without rethinking the euro, policies protecting wages and jobs cannot be implemented.

However, what is missing from this exhaustive and learned catalogue is what you will not fail to notice: the main anti-destinator of our narrative: the piddino, defined as the anti-Socratic individual who knows he knows , and as the intellectually disadvantaged person who possesses a single neuron (the two definitions do not imply each other but are complementary and certainly not mutually exclusive).

Now, when it comes to thinking about ratios, as we've seen countless times, the lack of the second neuron is particularly debilitating, because it prevents us from simultaneously considering the numerator and denominator. Generally, in the mind of a Democratic Party member, the dynamics of a ratio are that of its numerator (the little number above it): a memory cell has it, and only that number matters. You'll understand, then, that for Democratic Party members (and their "useful idiots "), the idea that when a ratio "jumps" (a term they like, perhaps a reminder of the glories of a gushing youth…) it might simply be that the denominator is falling is unlikely to occur to them. In this case, however, this is precisely what happened. In fact, the decline in wages from winter 2021 to today has not been dramatic: the value of wages per hour worked was anomalous in winter 2021 (and even more so in 2020, but I'll come back to this if I have time), because the value of hours worked was abnormally low due to the (reckless) management of the pandemic.

Want proof? Just ask your smart friend which countries implemented "strict lockdowns" (i.e., strict confinement measures) in the winter of 2021! Your smart friend tells us that:

So, Korea's stellar growth compared to 2021 is essentially due to the fact that there were no lockdowns there (but the tracking method was followed), while Italy's "disaster" is due to the statistical effect I highlighted: it's not a 7.7% "collapse" after 2021, but rather the absorption (after 2021) of a 7.3% "surge" between autumn 2019 and spring 2020 (you can clearly see this in the figure). Naturally, I'm choosing Italy and (South) Korea because they share various dimensional and morphological characteristics (medium-to-large manufacturing nations), and also because they share a figure no one told you about except me, despite it being hidden in plain sight in the same infographic: the trend quarterly growth rate (quarter over quarter of the previous year) is faster than average unit wages in real terms (with Korea slightly ahead)! And this explains why the two countries where wages have objectively grown the fastest have seen such seemingly contrasting results: a statistical anomaly in the denominator (that object that the Democratic Party and useful idiots can't seem to cram together with the numerator into their only neuron), caused by two different approaches to managing the pandemic, which have been used to spin a vile and defeatist narrative by (knowingly or unknowingly) differently praised individuals.

The funny thing is that Perepè is aware of the phenomenon, at least in abstract terms. His eloquent (but rambling) tweet concludes with a sententious: "By choosing the right sample, you can say anything." You might be tempted to believe he knows this well because that's exactly what he does in many of his posts, including this one, but I reassure you: Gilberto isn't evil; there's no malice in his actions. Almost like a genitus infans, sine dolo lac concupiscit, and then he burps, which the crowd that populates the sewer applauds with agreement.

The political consideration is very concise and essentially permeates the first part of this post: just like supranational organizations, the media-judicial complex, and the Democratic Party members, the "sovereignists" are also our class enemies, and I don't think I can give you better proof of this than that contained in this post: in order to attack us, they are willing to become passive and subservient disseminators of factoids artfully created by international organizations to undermine a government perceived as hostile, and I'm sorry, but, as always, good faith doesn't interest me.

If you shoot me, your intentions are decidedly secondary to the possible outcomes, and therefore, with all due respect to someone who thought he was a leftist (but fortunately for those who appreciate him, he didn't have time to express himself on the issue, otherwise you would have discovered he was just some Celestini or Dandini…), since we're in no hurry to lie buried in a wheat field here, with these filthy people it will always be total war, preferably preemptive, from whatever direction they come and regardless of their size and organizational structure (obviously proportioning the use of force and adapting tactics to the nature of the adversary).

You do as you wish: the only friend we have in this filthy and exhausting war is ourselves and our ability to remain lucid.

Hi, Perepè! You didn't win, and if you need my advice, don't try again…

But I know that the advice is vain: like a moth, or like a moth, you are irresistibly attracted to the fire that the Promethean actant continues to fuel here, in the Debate, so I am sure that you will return to get burned!

Without rancor and with unchanged esteem,

Alberto

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This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/02/la-trombetta-i-piddini-la-pandemia-e-la.html on Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:20:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.