Re: Wallerstein vs. Frank: imploding paradigms?

I read with interest Elson Boles article about Wallerstein and Frank's debate about world(-)systems. It seems to me that one aspect of a world-system that may be important for deciding membership is rough simultaneity of social, economic, political and cultural trends. For example, Frank hypothesizes that East Asia and Europe were part of the same world system that extends back before 1500. Wallerstein disagrees. Suppose we were to compare Kondratiev (and other) cycles for East Asia and Europe from the present extending backward. If we see rough alignment today, but divergence at some time in the past, we might be able to mark the time of divergence as when the two world-systems split off from each other. If such a split was noted just a few centuries ago, this could be taken as support of the Wallerstein view. On the other hand, if the two cycles remain aligned going back well before 1500, this might support the Frank view.

Now a particularly annoying problem with this is that Kondratiev cycles are devilishly hard to pin down. I've just published a book on Kondratiev cycles in which I have developed some new methods for identifying the cycles which may be of interest to list members.