Romer defined technological change as ‘an improvement in the instructions for mixing together raw materials’. Technological change was therefore, perhaps counter-intuitively, immaterial – amounting to nothing more than an upgraded re-arrangement of previous information. ‘Instructions for working with raw materials are inherently different from other economic goods,’ Romer concluded. So over time, as technology develops, the value increasingly arises from the instructions for materials as opposed to the materials themselves.
