It´s not just a critique, I was writing fast from the iphone and I haven´t explained my point completely. I think that in places like that small towns where people is "owned" by the landlord and a vicious circle of debt and low wages, it´s a necessary to use a system like BI to brake the chains and improve the living conditions. In fact in Spain country living conditions in certain areas, used to be quite similar to those of india(surely not that extreme, but not that far off at the beginning of the XX century). People lived in towns that where inside big landlords (most of them old nobility). The landlord used to be like a small king in their lands able to change the fate of families, that have to pay land rents. So the public wages was a big help to end that problem (that and the emigration to the cities that reduced the population). But there is moment when this no-conditions money just keeps people from improving further. You may see it as an engine starter, without it, is impossible to start the engine, if you stop it too early, the whole engine will stop again, but if you keep it engaged it will drag the engine and keep it from working properly.

What about the system that was at work in communist Poland (and other USSR sattelites, I believe)?

There was obligation to work, unless you were sick. You could choose your trade, and if you were lazy/stupid/handicapped you were offered job that weren't demanding. Salaries were centrally planed, as was prices. The end effect was - less than 1% unemployement, huge drop in efficiency, no creativity boost to speak of.

I wonder if BI experiments suffer from observer bias - if the experiment was going bad it would be stopped, or at least people participating may think it would be. It's usually small community so they know who isn't working, and they can influence him.

If you were to introduce BI on huge scale, in a way that people take it for granted, I think the results would be much worse (and much more realistic).

You leave out the part where the USSR and other centrally planned economies had to balance linear systems of billions of variables by hand (and rudimentary computers). And where they had to invent from scratch an ideal allocation of goods and services, which tended to represent what was best for the Soviet state and its bureaucrats at the expense of consumer goods and entrepreneurial capital.

People react to incentives. In the Soviet Union, "they pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work": although workers certainly received money in exchange for labor, increasing the amount of money you had did not typically increase the goods and services available to you, as the price system was so messed up that real prices were measured in waiting times and political favors.

A basic income avoids that trap because it leverages the distributed computation of the market to set prices. People will still be at least as entrepreneurial as they are now, because there's the opportunity for huge, outsized profits for both the entrepreneur and the provider of capital.

Also note that most salary workers nowadays make far in excess (typically 50k+) of what the minimum income would provide (on the order of 10k). Most of us here could work for a year, survive on what the minimum income would provide, and then have enough savings left over for nearly another decade at minimum income levels. But we don't do that, because we want more, and that wouldn't change with a minimum income.