Without continuous basic research technology will stagnate and economy will be in no growth. Why

growth. Why? DTU Orbit (24/09/2019) Without continuous basic research technology will stagnate and economy will be in no growth. Why? The paper presents some ideas about new knowledge and the effects from knowledge on development of new technology. Paul M. Romer established in the 1980s the so-called New Growth Economy. The basic idea is here that knowledge is included explicitly in the production function. With knowledge as a public good its unit costs will be declining and it can substitute other inputs with not-declining unit costs. A problem with that idea is the neglect of the cost connected with production of a new idea. Joel Mokyr has from the end of 1990s developed his ideas about the knowledge economy. He distingues between propositional knowledge and prescriptive knowledge. The first-mentioned is about what nature is. The second-mentioned is about how to manipulate to get a wanted result. What is important is that m ost important new technologies cannot be developed without many different areas of propositional knowledge. You can't stumble over the recombinant DNA technology. Even if we have the basic scientific results about genetics and how knowledge can be reproduced as shown in the Crick-Watson double helix model from 1953 it took twenty years before the first gene-splicing was able to be done. So we can't go directly from basic-sceince into working technology. But without basic-science we can't do anything.