I’m in the middle of Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston, and it’s as gripping and scary as a horror novel. Call it economic-horror nonfiction.

Johnston goes into a lot of detail about the commodification of labor, and how that trend works through a kind of outsourcing osmosis. To break it down to Duplos: Labor, including that done in front of a computer screen, will naturally move from high-cost countries (e.g., the U.S.) to low-cost countries like China and India. That process amounts to a third Industrial Revolution.

Here’s a scary passage:

“The first two jobs revolutions had in common one trait — people of average or even below-average intelligence could do many of the jobs with no more than a high school education. Will that be true in the digital, high tech third wave? And if it is not, what will be the consequences of living in a society where the brightest and hardest working are rewarded and almost everyone else is reduced to servant-level jobs and wages?”

Ponder that.

I generally consider myself a smart guy. I thought of copy editing as a safe career choice for a long while. Specialized knowledge of an area is critical to what I do. But then, a lot of what I do at work involves Googling this fact or that fact. As much as I hate to admit, that could be done from Bangalore. Is there value in a copy editor living and working where the copy originates? I’d like to think so.

But then, a friend caught up in the recent McClatchy layoffs tells me her job is going to India. She’s a page designer, but if a media company can outsource design positions, copy editing isn’t far behind.

I don’t want to be “reduced to servant-level jobs and wages,” but what happens when what I do evaporates?