The question of whether lazy people will take advantage of the system is not a life-or-death question. The life-or-death question is whether highly motivated and desperate people will take risks they shouldn't because we make them take those risks.
Start with comprehensive zoning reform to reduce the cost of housing. https://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/growth.pdf
Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent from 1964 to 2009. (JEL E23, J24, J31, R23, R31)
Imagine multiplying everyone's effective salary by 36%. We'd have a lot less real poverty. California meanwhile, despite its ostensible liberality, has the highest poverty rate in the country due to building restrictions: https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20....
A kid drops out of high school, plays video games instead. Two years have passed, now he has a two year career gap. "Eh, I'll just stay home and figure something out." Now he has a four year career gap...
If you have a survival stipend, it's probably a lot more common for qualified, competent people to have career gaps. I probably would, personally. That makes it easier for the depressed kid to compete whenever he decides to rejoin the job market. (Also, for some reason, parents who set up trust funds tend not to worry about this....)
Also chances are if the depressed kid stays home for a few years, he will find some calling he actually likes - programming, music, writing, some specific type of research, whatever - and come out of it with a particular qualification to do something. What's the benefit to the depressed kid of having him flip burgers and stack shelves and have no time to figure out what he actually enjoys?
Treatment for mental health problems is expensive. The underlying issues can have causes that require a lot of time to solve. Therapist trips are expensive. Some of it isn't covered by your insurance. You lose a lot on productivity as a parent of the kid. You will need to dedicate time to him unlike in other situations where you can be fine delegating the responsibilities.
A kid drops out of high school, gets depressed instead. Two years have passed, he can't afford the treatment and needs to get out but his issues aren't resolved. He is forced to work, burning himself out. He can't be productive or do critical creative work that pays well. Now he has gone 4 years without being treated, having time to recover and is in a worse position.
This is why I think there needs to be some level of threat of destitution to keep society functional. Without it, this all falls apart.
Personally, I spend a lot of my time keeping a hedge fund's computers working, because they pay me well for it (and I want to not only avoid destitution now, I want savings to avoid destitution in the future). I spend about zero time on any of my open-source projects, which would be more valuable for humanity as a whole, but I can't figure out how to get paid the same amount (or really anything) working on them. And I know my projects are valuable to the economy too - I arrived at this job to find that another team was doing a big migration onto a project I maintain (and haven't had much time for). I didn't know this in advance, and they didn't know I was joining their company.
Besides - it's okay if many people lose their motivation to work, as long as enough people still work from intrinsic motivation. And you'd still have the motivation of needing to earn money for luxuries. Once you finish your stack of books, the survival stipend wouldn't cover buying any more books.
Isn’t society’s willingness to pay you for something a decent signal that society values it?
It is possible that I could charge support contracts for the software now - but it's just about done, and it's pretty well documented, and if anything I'd have less incentive to write public docs. And I have no mechanism to get people to fund the next thing I want to work on and think is a good idea. (Well, I could continue working at a high-paying job for a few years and then quit, of course... but the logical conclusion of that loophole is that nobody should be paid enough that they can afford to quit, else they'd be able to ignore the market, right?)
Probably there's a serious but unknown-sized effect about what would happen if it wouldn't be a trial. (There was a link and a discussion on HN a few days ago.) The folks in the trial went to school and so on. (And that's included in the 10%, so who knows, maybe those would cancel out.)
In your example, books I'll concede you could do on the cheap, but woodworking not so much. As a hobbyist woodworker myself, I know how much all the basic tools cost, and then the wood on top of that (+ a large margin for how frequently I botch a good plank).
And it's not like we need to provide a 3,000 sqft penthouse to those who are not contributing to society; something that keeps people safe from the elements but is otherwise pretty bland would be okay. I think it could be sufficiently bland that folks would be motivated to work to upgrade.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Debt...
Before you brush that off, I'll add that my forebears migrated to the US after having survived WWII and it's aftermath. The current generation takes global peace for granted but anyone who has studied history knows that is not the natural order of things.
Instead you are telling the world to go back to the pre-WW2 state of affairs and invest in defence, because "that is not the natural order of things". Great, we are humans, we have built a lot of things out of the natural order, I believe we can do better and I'm glad it's become the norm to consider peace as the status quo and not as an outlier, as a mindset it's much healthier for humanity.
Also, I hear that China is able to fund its own defense and also provide some sort of social safety net. So did the USSR.
Anyway - I'm not advocating "America should be like country X," whether Denmark or China. I very intentionally said we need to figure out how to do this. That's probably going to involve something new, not copying another country, because I do agree things are different when you're a superpower. I also didn't say "we" in the sense of "America" - pandemics don't respect national borders. The failings of China's social safety net are my problem too.