This article is NOT "the red team vs blue team logic", it's data driven, dispassionate reporting, which gp is projecting partisan bias because they just don't like the conclusions it's finding.

That was before inflation. Using https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL , it looks like the CPI was 78 in January 1980, and 244.456 in February 2017 (the most recent data currently available). Meaning that $1 from 1980 would buy as much as $3.13 last February, and $40,000 in 1980 would be equivalent to $125,362 in February. Perhaps not enough for two homes and a boat, but pretty good income in most of the US.

Then again, there are plenty of caveats: the CPI overstates inflation, there are things on the market today that no amount of money could have bought in 1980, etc.

accounting for inflation, the buying power of $40k in 1980 is the equivalent of $118k today... enough to buy a house, a vacation house, a boat, and multiple vacations year in most regions. Maybe the percentage of the population making this amount has decreased, I'm not sure, but the buying power is roughly the same.

And if you're going back to 1970: $40k in 1970 dollars could buy you $250k of stuff today.

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Sounds a lot older than fifty. A fifty-year old would have been thirteen in 1980. Maybe they're sixty?

Median household income in 1980 was $16,671 [0] so someone making $40,000 was a high earner. In 2014 it was $53,013.

[0] http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php

I believe the staff of The Economist is sourced primarily from Great Britain, and since they refuse to add bylines, it's impossible to know where this author is actually from.