I was reading an interesting article by Tim Harford commenting that in recent years patents and other innovations have come from much larger teams than in the past. Those teams are made up of more specialised people and those people are so specialised that they are unlikely to contribute to innovations in any other field.
That makes innovation much more expensive than it used to be, (he gives the example that the Spitfire was prototyped for roughly the price of a london house), you couldn't make similar comparisons now to the cost of developing any kind of vehicle, let alone a game changing one - and maybe as a result the rate of innovation is slowing.
His point was that we need to look at new ways to pay for innovation as the model we need is somewhere between government research programmes (which are might spend a lot of money but isn't keen on long odds) and the private sector (which doesn't mind long odds so long as they are comparatively cheap).
Instead we should look at something closer to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute - invest huge sums in highly speculative work, where the failure rate is high, but where success results in 'block busters' - massive innovations
And as for taxing the profits of the church - I don't know about the C of E but the church of Scotland is dying on its arse. Around 120 ministers retire every year and only 4 or 5 are recruited, even by they're own admission they think they'll be extinct in the near future.
) and they'll be slightly different across the sources.
