Image of White Castle Tapas, from  Fancy Fast Food .

Penny pinching is in fashion in the current economic crisis. Many people simply can’t afford expensive food, clothing, and consumer goods anymore. The extravagance of 2006 seems gauche and out of touch today. Science Daily reports that economic pressures are forcing people to rethink their desperate need to differentiate themselves from others using expensive consumer goods.

“Cheap is having a moment,” Noreen Malone writes in the American Prospect. Buzzwords like “recessionista” and “frugalista” have crept into American vocabularies and companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds are enjoying profits in the down economy. In reviewing the book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Malone explores the ways “we’ve been seduced by low prices into forgetting our best interests.” Quality and durability are being sacrificed in favor of cheapness and convenience, often to the detriment of the environment and our own budgets.

Frugal extroverts don’t have to give up all the pleasures in life, though, just because people are cutting back on their budgets. In a hilarious piece in the latest issue of Utne Reader, Mark G. Hannah shows how people can entertain during the recession. His advice: Fake it. Cheap Smirnoff vodka can be poured into the expensive Grey Goose bottle. And Spam can replace the more expensive Virginia ham, with none of your guests the wiser.

To prove the point, the intrepid folks behind Fancy Fast Food give step-by-step instructions on turning White Castle, Taco Bell, and Dominoes into attractive, if not tasty, dinner party fare.

Sources: Science Daily, American Prospect, Fancy Fast Food 

Believers in survival of the fittest may struggle to explain the existence of skinny weaklings in human society. Evolutionarily, the muscle-bound beefcakes should have banished the wimps from the face of the earth long ago. New research, however, shows that pipsqueaks may have some evolutionary benefits that jocks don’t have.

Scrawny people may have quicker reaction times than the more physically fit, according to research published on Science Daily. The researchers theorize that the more finely tuned reactions “may have evolved to help the weak get out of the way of approaching danger.”

The most hulking people also have a harder time battling disease. The New Scientist reports that “the downside of all that brawn is a poor immune system and an increased appetite.” The increased appetite may not seem like a bad thing today, but evolutionarily, having to constantly eat may was considered a disadvantage.

All’s not lost for the muscle-bound among us, however. More physically fit men are generally more attractive to women, tended to lose their virginity at a younger age, and had more life-time sexual partners. Researchers think that the relative costs and benefits of physical fitness may explain why both geeks and jocks still survive.

For John Hodgman’s  take on the culture war between nerds and jocks, watch the video below:

Sources:  Science Daily ,  New Scientist  

Image by Crimfants, licensed under Creative Commons.

People can do their own taxes, control their spending, contribute to retirement funds, and psychologists will still think they’re irrational about money. And more than likely, they're are right.

In many situations, people think more about the size of numbers than what they represent, according to an article in Science Daily. Using studies on risk aversion, psychologists at Ohio State University showed that people think of 300 cents as greater than $3, even though they hold the same value.

People also think of money “in terms of percentages, not in terms of absolute numbers,” behavioral economist Dan Ariely told Marketplace. He gave an example: If a person found out that they could save $7 on a $15 pen by walking five blocks, many people would do it. If they were told they could save  $7 on a suit that cost $1,015, most people wouldn’t bother.

Both examples show how people can be entirely irrational, even when working with small numbers. When it comes to $700 billion bail out plans, I shudder to think.