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?)
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.
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.
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.)