Can ecological models explain global financial markets?

This looks extremely interesting; I've felt for a long time that the social sciences would do well to study biological models more closely and adopt a more simulation-based approach. For that matter, it's often interesting to consider social structures as analogs of organs within the human body and vice versa. /handwave

Unfortunately, the Nature article is paywalled and eager though I am to read it, there is no way I am going to spend $32 when I could buy 2 or 3 books for the same price. (Why don't they just sell individual articles for $1.99 and split with Amazon or Google? They'd probably generate thousands of dollars on every paper, and many times that on pathbreaking ones. Extinction looms for the publishing industry as well as the banks if they don't adapt!)

Instead, here are slides from a 2010 oral presentation on the subject by May, which will probably be sufficient for most HN readers: http://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/colleges/merton/notes/may...

More by May: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7181/full/451893a... (overview) http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/46/823.full... (technical paper referenced in slides, lots of meat)

And the study referenced by May: http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/07v13n2/0711part3.pdf from http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/2007n1.html

Transcript of related speech by Haldane: http://www.bis.org/review/r100406d.pdf

Loosely related (network/system theory): http://fic.wharton.upenn.edu/fic/policy%20page/EP_HammondNet... http://www.ewp.rpi.edu/hartford/~stoddj/MacroPrinc/Journal%2...

And a few unrelated economic modeling papers that might however be useful in this context, on bank runs: http://mfi.uchicago.edu/publications/papers/a-model-of-a-sys... model validation: http://mfi.uchicago.edu/publications/papers/correct-specific... and DSGE modelling: http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/10v16n2/1010sbor.pdf