There they are sold products worth billions. Storytelling still has its place in the economy. Ethnographic films with tales of personal adventure, whether they are accurate or not, also bring in millions. However the culture core, the basic energy extraction process that supports survival and reproduction, is now more solidly based on another sort of knowledge, the knowledge contained in external memory, books, papers, documents, statistics, etc. In modern civilizations formal education imparts the skills necessary to deal with this knowledge, the ability to read, write, do mathematics, etc.
Narrative knowledge is still useful.
A good tale is easy to remember because it follows the flow of individual experience, the most primary pattern of neural activity. Narrative knowledge encodes and recreates experience. Writing and other forms of external memory can also lexically encode narrative knowledge and disseminated to many people. Narrative knowledge supports religious organizations, political systems, and ethnic identity. Narrative knowledge can be refined in the development of myth or in case studies of law.