Campbell's Law
Origin
From Campbell's 1976 paper "Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change". Discovered nearly simultaneously with Goodhart's Law but from a different field (sociology). Campbell proved that test scores, crime statistics, and unemployment rates all distort when used for policy. Goodhart (monetary) and Campbell (social) discovered the same truth at the same time — a beautiful coincidence.
Meaning
NYPD's 1990s CompStat system — when crime rates evaluated precincts, officers reclassified crimes to lower categories. Korean university volunteer score — when service activity became a score, the service itself became hollow. Every indicator decays the moment it is measured.
Lesson — Meeting Eastern Classics
Analects 2.14: "A gentleman is comprehensive, not comparative; a petty man is comparative, not comprehensive." Confucius warned of comparison's danger. Campbell measured the self-negation of a society that turned comparison into policy.
"量" combines weight (重) with dawn (旦) — originally a tool for measuring grain. Measuring was once sacred (grain, tax). But when 量 becomes policy rather than ritual, the sacred breaks. Campbell's Law records the corruption of 量.
