William Bruce Cameron

American sociologist · author of Informal Sociology (1963)

William Bruce Cameron was an American sociologist and educator. He used the phrase “not everything that can be counted counts” in professional journals in the late 1950s and folded it into the full chiastic maxim in his 1963 textbook Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking. The line, warning against mistaking the measurable for the meaningful, became his best-known legacy — ironically, mostly under someone else’s name.

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“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”

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