Introduction

When, in the 1930s, the basic concepts of what would later become the System of National Accounts were developed, the USA and Europe were experiencing what we call the “Great Depression”. The comparison with today might seem risky. Nevertheless, the very extensive critical situation we are experiencing now in the post-pandemic era presents some similar features. The socio-economic system proved its fragility having exacerbated social inequalities both at global and local levels (Pleyers 2020). The war tensions and the unstable international orders are signs of an analogous profound crisis. Going beyond the realm of uncertainty, the common thread linking these two eras is the pursuit of hope (Scribano 2023), which entails a shared yearning to seek, chase, or explore the establishment of a novel tomorrow. This endeavor encompasses the endeavor to locate sources of innovation, aiming to address challenges and demanding situations. To put it differently, in both historical epochs, the shared desire for a better society has prompted proactive preparations for what lies ahead. However, what is more, similar is that every crisis leads a society back to its values and its priorities. From this perspective, as in the past even now the quest for hope can be addressed by rethinking the systems of social development and its evaluation mechanisms. If the 1929 Depression triggered the development of new ways of conceiving and measuring the productive activity of the various countries, the current crisis may also be a propitious moment to accelerate the review of existing systems.

Indeed, drawing inspiration from the devastating effects of COVID-19, several intellectuals launched appeals to renovate the idea of well-being and its accounting system in our society. Latour (2020), for example, invited us to abandon production as the only principle of progress and relationship in the world. Philosophers and sociologists, such as Morin (2020), Hanafi (2020), and Martins (2020), also hoped for the overcoming of a unilinear idea of development, wishing the advent of a new political-ecological-economic-social path guided by a regenerated humanism. Other renowned economists, such as Sachs (2017), and Nobel laureates, such as Yunus (2020), launched an appeal to seize the—unrepeatable—opportunity of the crisis for embarking on the path of a new ecology renovating the current accounting system in the logic of social and natural sustainability.

This convergence has fueled again the debate on the evaluation systems used worldwide to assess the well-being of people and the prosperity of countries. Since the end of the last century, the debate conducted both at the political and academic levels had stressed the need to integrate the gross domestic product (GDP) as the main indicator of wealth used for transnational comparison. Evidence collected showed GDP as increasingly unsuitable for measuring well-being in an increasingly complex society: it only measures the value of a country’s economy while neglecting activities that do not directly have a monetary implication and sometimes leading to paradoxical conclusions (Sen, 1999; Stiglitz et al., 2009; Alvaro, 2011; Stiglitz & Fitoussi, 2009; Laurent et al., 2011; Duraiappah, 2018). GDP does not distinguish welfare-improving activity from welfare-reducing activity (Talberth et al. 2007). With the way that it has been used up to date, it has confounded prosperity with growth (Jackson 2012). Sustainability concepts had been expressed quite early in the history of GDP. Indeed, the inventor of GDP himself, Simon Kuznets (1934), had first objected that “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income”.

Within this framework, the European Commission, as well as many of its member states, has prompted a new in-depth reflection on the issue of moving beyond GDP as the only instrument that has become ineffective in measuring a country’s social progress and its level of well-being. The exclusive focus on work or productive activities risks neglecting other social aspects which, although not passing through the market logic, do affect people’s and community life. From the earliest years, the reflection launched in the beyond GDP debate approached the idea to complement this measure with a basket of alternative indicators, able to express, thanks to their multiplicity, in a more complete way what counts for common people. In other words, the idea is that “such a system must, of necessity, be plural – because no single measure can summarize something as complex as the well-being of the members of society, our system of measurement must encompass a range of different measures” (Stiglitz et al., 2009, p. 14). The search for a plurality of indicators is even more urgent in today’s times when the economic crisis caused by the pandemic requires identifying new paths of development and also new ways of conceiving and operating the well-being of people and nations. In addition, the process launched in synergy with the UN 2030 Agenda requires the development of sustainability indicators with a specific focus on the dimension of social connections and relationships. Indeed, sustainability does not only refer to the present but also to the future, as it is closely related to the ability of individuals and social groups to cultivate hope through concrete practices. Thus, the need of complementing economic indicators with a basket of alternative indicators able to take into account regenerated forms of humanism seems to be urgent.

Since the 1980s, there have been several attempts to identify complementary measures to GDP, among them (to cite just a few) are the ISEW, the GPI, the HDI, the IEWB, and the SDG’s. The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), devised by Daly and Cobb (1989), adjusts GDP by including income inequalities, household labor, and damage to natural capital. Later, during the 1990s, the ISEW was further modified by the organization Redefining Progress, which proposed the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). This indicator incorporates environmental, social, and economic information (Cobb and Rixford 1998). Also, during the 1990s, the Human Development Index (HDI) was designed by economist Mahbub Ul Haq (1995). This index has been used by the United Nations as an indicator of a nation’s well-being since 1993. A further proposal in this direction is the Index of economic well-being (IEWB), which aims to integrate GDP by considering income inequality and poverty (Osberg 1985; Osberg and Sharpe 1998; Thiry 2015). Finally, in 2015, the Sustainable Developments Goals (SDG’s) were defined by the United Nations in order to contribute to global development and promote human well-being, leading to the approval of the 2030 Agenda.

As shown, the heated debate on complementing GDP as a measure of well-being has already produced some new measurement systems that had a practical application, both at the level of economic and social policies, especially in the Global North, and at the level of development cooperation policies for countries in the Global South. However, for assessing the quality of life of people and the environment, an essential gap needs to be filled (Stiglitz et al., 2009): the dimension of social connections and relationships. Especially after the pandemic, focusing on this dimension appears even more important.

Precisely on this dimension addresses the World Love Index proposed in this paper. Engaging in the debate on alternative and complementary measures to GDP to operationalize the well-being of populations in the world, it proposes a new index from secondary data sources that aim to express how much people take care of others and the world. The key concept of this new global index is social love. The idea is that, although it is an almost neglected dimension in empirical research (Oman, 2011, p. 946), love is a constitutive element of society and its cohesion, being able to capture the altruism that exists within populations of different countries. Within this perspective, social love can be a sign of hope since it marks a transition towards a new social ecology highlighting the critical potential of people and communities.

The paper is organized as follows: the next section focuses on the theoretical and operational definition of social love. Then, in “The Research Design of the World Love Index” section, the methodology for building a composite index of social love is presented. The “Clustering Countries on Social Love” section clusters countries in relation to social love dimensions. The final section highlights where traces of hope can be detected and discuss their implications for social and political transformation.

The Concept of Social Love

The concept of social love does not constitute a novelty in sociology; rather, it can be represented as a concept that for decades, like a karst stream, has crossed sociological reflection. In fact, some classical sociologists already approach this concept in their works, in a more or less explicit way, identifying it as an important factor of sociality.

Max Weber already wondered about the origin of social love. He found the answer in the communal condition of suffering that characterizes human life, and which provokes social love. It is the trait of reality on which the process of constructing meaning of theodicies is grafted to give a sense of rationality to the common life.

The most extensive discussion about social love can be found in the Sociology of Religions, in the Intermediate Considerations (Weber, 1915a), which is a widely analyzed text in the interpretive literature and it has been considered the central text to understand Weber’s thought (e.g., Tenbruck, 1980; Turner, 1992; Bellah, 1999) and in the Preliminary Remarks.

Moreover, the concept of love is also prominently present in the Introduction to the Economic Ethics of World Religions, and in the sections on religion and power in Economy and Society (Weber, 1921). Weber points out that, for the religions of redemption, the presence of the unjustified pain for innocent people in this world is evidence that the dimension of existence is an essentially irrational place. The finiteness of the human condition, the uncontrollability of social events, the contingency of life, and death, and the hiatus between moral merit and social merit, feed the attempts to solve and understand the problem of pain; they have been the driving forces of the great religions, whose fundamental element is the development of an ethic based on the brotherly love, effect, and expression of the rationalization of the world (Weber, 1915b, p. 272-275; 1921, p. 518).

Also, Simmel and Sorokin have left an interesting thought about love. Simmel (1907, 1921), for example, qualifies love as the main viaticum for the establishment of relationships that allows the transition from the individual to the supra-individual or collective level. Sorokin (1954) dedicates his entire career to altruistic love as the driving force of unconditional and reciprocal relationships.

An interesting connection between the concept of social love and hope is also offered by Hannah Arendt. In her juvenile paper Love and Saint Augustine (1929), the author analyzes the hierarchy of love, to the point of identifying the highest form in amor mundi. This is the drive that leads people to care for others and the world and is the basis of political action, understood as a free and selfless act of building the future.

A more direct link between love and hope is clarified in contemporary literature. An author who has dealt explicitly with this concept is the French sociologist Boltanski (1990), a pupil of Bourdieu who, trying to respond to the aporias of structuralism, proposes the concept of agape as a regime of action that allows one to escape from the impasse of accounting that has colonized every sphere of human action. Also, Honneth (1992), a third-generation exponent of the Frankfurt school in Germany, highlights how love is fundamental in sociality, as it represents the first stage of the theory of recognition. In fact, according to the author, the experience of being loved represents a prerequisite for each person to participate in the public life of a community. Taking up the young Hegel, Honneth (1992) considers love as the basis of an intersubjective recognition, that is, the original core of all ethics and the foundation of law and solidarity.

Starting from these ideas, the research group identifies social love defining it as “an action, relationship or social interaction in which subjects exceed (in giving, in receiving, in not giving or not doing, in neglecting) all its antecedents, and therefore, offers more than what the situation requires in order to render benefits” (Iorio, 2014, 25; Araújo et al., 2016; Martins, Cataldi, 2016).

Our study, therefore, investigates the level of social love existing in the different countries, in the hypothesis that “the act of altruism in the true sense of giving to strangers with no considerations of reciprocity [is] an indicator of the good society” (Laurent, Van Der Maesen, Walker, 2011, 165). So the higher the level of social love, the higher the levels of solidarity and social cohesion.

On this basis, two semantic dimensions of the concept of social love have been identified:

  1. 1.

    the overabundance: it is the typicality of social love, that is, giving more than the situation demands or more than what one has received according to a given measure; social love occurs when individuals refuse to keep count and show unconditional behaviors, unexplained by a criterion of “do ut des”. Overabundance breaks shared expectations and overcomes any antecedent with the action;

  2. 2.

    the care of others: the overabundance of love can be negative if it is not doing good to another person. For example, love can be suffocating. For this reason, it is important to have an objective criterion of love: doing good to others. Examples of care of others are helping the people nearby to care for their well-being, especially if they are vulnerable or poor people;

Two criteria were also used to specify the dimensions above mentioned. The first is universalism: the concept of social love refers to types of love that goes beyond in-groups (partner, family members, friends, etc.). For this reason, examples of social love are helping an unknown person or someone from another country or culture, even helping an ungrateful person. Indeed, nobody has the expectation that you will do something for these people. Moreover, another specification criterion was the recognition of others: it requires considering the other person as irreducible and singular and looking at the person in his/her specificity, whatever it is. Examples of love of this kind can be welcoming the idea of the other even if divergent from mine, considering the diversity of the other person as an added value for me and society.

Through this path, it is therefore possible to operationalize the concept of social love. In fact, although it is difficult to translate into operational terms as it is mostly linked to the sphere of the tacit (Montesperelli, 2014), in the work that we present below, we have tried to find for each dimension some indicators of behaviors, opinions, and feelings considered proxies of social love.

The observation of social love on a global level can be seen as a testimony to the spread of values and positive actions aimed at improving the well-being of a society beyond the economic aspect. Answering the question “to what extent social love has quantitatively spread into countries all around the world?” contributes to answering the question “what hope for a better future?”.

Gili and Mangone (2023, p. 14) believe that hope “contains a tension towards a future – as such – that can only be based on trust in that what is hoped for can be realised. (...) Furthermore, hope has two constitutive conditions: desirability and estimability. Both have a profound sociological significance and directly challenge sociology. Indeed, one always hopes for something s/he values, to which s/he attributes a value (estimative aspect)”.

Obviously, hope operates at different levels, regarding social love, it is connected with the concept of so-called collective hope, which is distinct from individual hope and public hope: “Public hope can become manipulative and must have proper checks to maintain its congruence with individual hopes of the populace” (Lueck, 2007, p. 252). Collective hope is a shared desire for a better society, articulated through a broad set of agreed-upon goals and principles, developed and elaborated through socially inclusive dialogue (Braithwaite, 2004, p. 146). It is a kind of a “renewable resource for social change” (Courville and Piper 2004, pp. 57–58) in which worldview proposes that development, betterment, and/or change is possible. In this sense, hope and utopia are essential elements of human action and thinking that cannot be privatized, as they enable social practices to cultivate the future (Bloch, 1954).

For these reasons, the concept of social love as a measurement of well-being and the concept of collective hope for a better future are closely linked.

The Research Design of the World Love Index

The World Love Index is a secondary data analysis project. “Secondary data analysis concerns the analysis of previously collected, available and systematically organised data, having an individual or aggregate unit of analysis, coming from one or more statistical sources, with the aim of answering a defined research question regardless of the purposes for which the data are originally collected” (Biolcati Rinaldi & Vezzoni, 2012, p. 16; Goodwin, 2012).

The World Love Index matrix is composed of aggregated national data; the original individual data are answers given by thousands of respondents to the questionnaires of two international surveys: Gallup World Poll (GWP) and World Values Survey (WVS).

GWP is a longitudinal survey; since 2005, the questionnaire has been administered annually in around 140 countries through nationally representative samples (with telephone or face-to-face interviews). On average, 1000 people are interviewed in each country included in the research design. GWP collects information about citizens’ public life engagement, social issues, environment and energy, education and families, law, and order. The indicators selected by the research group come from the GWP data that are the same as those used in the World Giving Index (WGI). The WGI is a world index created by the Charity Aid Foundation (CAF), one of the world’s leading charitable organizations, to rank the most generous countries in the world. The WGI is shaped by the answers given by thousands of respondents to three questionsFootnote 1 of GWP questionnaire, which are the only three variables of GWP dataset integrated into the World Love Index matrix.

The WVS dataset is a longitudinal survey; since 1981, the questionnaire has been administered (with face-to-face interviews) to about 1200 people living in each of the 60–90 countries included in the research design through nationally representative samples. Usually, two waves are conducted once a decade. WVS is a scientific project involving an international network of researchers and academics who study how people’s values change over time and how these changes affect communities’ public social and political life. It investigates trust in others and institutions, religious values, disposition for caring for others, and sensitivity towards the poorest and the environment.

Data from WVS 6, collected from 2010 to 2014, are then integrated with data of GWP, as a national average of data collected from 2010 to 2014. Finally, 55 countries compose the rows of the World Love Index matrix.

Taken from the questionnaires of GWP 2010–2014 and WVS 6, some questions, which operationalize properties considered to be valid indicators of social love concept dimensions, are first selected. In the second step, the validity of each relationship established between indicating concept and indicated concept is evaluated by content validation (Marradi, 2007): a group of experts is asked to assess the capability of each indicator to semantically represent a specific dimension of the social love concept. A group of experts external to the research team validated 16 of the 25 first selected indicators. Within each dimension of the social love concept, we report (Table 1) the list of validated indicators; the text of the questions; for each question, the category of answer used for data aggregationFootnote 2; and the original dataset (GWP or WVS).

Table 1 The indicators of social love dimensions
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After the indicators are validated theoretically and anchored to the different sub-dimensions of the social love concept, the following step in order to answer the first research question is the factor analysis, employed to assess the empirical relationships between the indicators and their common semantic sub-dimensions. The factor logic is the most suitable data analysis approach to reach the following empirical objectives: multi-dimensional concept clarification and indicators validation to construct synthetic indexes.

A two-stage principal component analysis is carried out: the conceptual dimensions, common to the initial basket of variables, are interpreted; in the second stage, the subsets of variables, which compose the semantic core of each dimension identified at the first stage, are isolated with the aim of refining the number of indicators to be employed for the construction of one or more factor indexes, able of summarizing the multidimensionality of World Love Index matrix. These two stages are equally important, and their complementarity is widely demonstrated by the methodological literature (Marradi, Di Franco, 2003).

The first stage of principal component analysis shows that the first and second components reproduce almost half (44.139%) of the variance common to the World Love Index matrix variables. They are the two most informative factors in our analysis. The variance gap is large, moving from the second to the third component. It is therefore decided to analyze the first and the second component; it is a syntactic and semantic decision based on the matrix of the component loadings (Table 2).

Table 2 The component loadings (Varimax rotation)
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The most important variable of the first component is “Helped a stranger or someone you didn’t know who needed help” (0.828). The other variables with high component loadings are “Given money to a charity” (0.763), “Volunteered your time to an organization” (0.748), “Given money to an ecological organization” (0.737), “Membership of humanitarian organization” (0.727), and “Membership of ecological organization” (0.595). The first component is saturated by variables referring to the dimension of overabounding action, in which the individual does more than what the context requires: helping strangers in need, donating time in voluntary activities to help people in need, donating money to humanitarian and environmental organizations, being members of humanitarian and environmental organizations. This subset of six variables constitutes a cohesive semantic core, having a strong connection with the dimension of action. But it is not generic action; it is a loving and overabounding action, which connects ego to alter: the individual gives her/himself for others, without conditionality, without asking anything in return. Therefore, the first component is labeled “Dimension of action: overabundance”.

The most important variables of the second component are “Environmental pollution is the most serious problem for the world as a whole” (0.856), “People living in poverty is the most serious problem for the world as a whole” (−0.758), “Progress toward a less impersonal and more humane society is the first most important thing” (0.633), and “Progress toward a less impersonal and more humane society is the second most important thing” (0.611). This subset of variables pertains to the cognitive dimension of human attitude; it is composed of three attitude questions, collecting opinions towards poverty, pollution, and human progress. In the World Love Index matrix, these three variables represent another relevant semantic aspect of the social love concept: the care of others. Theoretically, a social love behavior must benefit the recipient. The overabundance, alone, is not enough to connote a social love behavior; a loving gesture is social when it exceeds the collective expectations and, at the same time, it benefits the other in priority. The people living in poverty, pollution, and society are considered three different types of beneficiaries of overabounding orientation, who deserve to be prioritized. It should be noted that this dimension cannot be interpreted in terms of greater or lesser intensity for the orientation towards the care of othersFootnote 3. Rather, it distinguishes different types of beneficiaries to benefit in priority: the poor and the people in need, the environment, and society in general. Therefore, the second component is labeled “Types of overabounding orientation”Footnote 4.

The second stage principal component analysis is employed to refine the number of variables composing the semantic core of each dimension identified in the first stage; these two subgroups are subjected to another principal component analysis separately. In the second stage, the researcher’s attention is not focused on the component’s interpretation but on the relationships among the variables of the same group. The more the variables are associated, the more they are closed to each other in the factor space. When the refinement process is complete, and the variables considered central in the semantic dimension remain, the factor index is designed and composed of a restricted number of variables, considered the best indicators available in the matrix.

The procedure on the first component shows that “Membership of ecological organization” and “Membership of humanitarian organization” are detached from the rest of the variables saturated on this first factor. Being a member, even a non-active member, of an ecological and/or charitable organization is not a valid indicator of the general concept represented by the first component. On the contrary, “Helping a stranger in need”, “Donating money to charitable organizations”, “Donating time in voluntary activities”, and “Donating money to environmental organizations” are valid indicators of the “Dimension of action: overabundance”. The dimension of overabounding action can be empirically investigated by these four indicators in the matrix of the World Love Index: they refer to a practical action that goes beyond what others think it is necessary to do; an overabounding behavior creates social relations between the acting subject and the beneficiary subject. On the other hand, the mere membership of an organization, even charitable or ecological, is not enough to establish a connection between ego and alter that goes beyond the individual sphere.

The procedure on the second component shows that “Progress toward a less impersonal and more humane society is the first most important thing” and “Progress toward a less impersonal and more humane society is the second most important thing” are detached from “People living in poverty is the most serious problem for the world as a whole” and “Environmental pollution is the most serious problem for the world as a whole”. Evidently, the opinions towards progress with more human and less impersonal relationships are not valid indicators of the conceptual dimension represented by the second component. On the contrary, the opinion that poverty is the greatest problem for humanity and the idea that environmental pollution represents the greatest global threat for humanity are valid indicators, even if these variables are associated negatively. “Environmental pollution is the most serious problem for the world as a whole” and “People living in poverty is the most serious problem for the world as a whole” characterize towards whom or what it is worth directing the overabounding action: the poor and people in need, or the environment suffocated by the pollution produced by human activity. The merit of these two variables is to focus the respondent’s opinion on a clear cognitive object and not on a vague reference to a more human and less impersonal society. In conclusion, they are two valid indicators of the second dimension “Types of overabounding orientation”. Table 3 shows the variables and the component score coefficients employed for designing the first-factor index “Dimension of action: overabundance” and the second-factor index “Types of overabounding orientation”.

Table 3 The component score coefficients
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Clustering Countries on Social Love

Once the two-factor indexes are finalized, they are used to perform cluster analysis in order to answer the second research question. Figure 1 shows 55 countries (the cases of the World Love Index matrix); their position depends on the factor coordinates, dual values each country assumes on the index “Dimension of action: overabundance” and on the index “Types of overabounding orientation”.

Fig. 1
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The projection of nations

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Through the inspection of the dendrogram, a nine-group solution is adopted. Group 1 and Group 2 consist of one country each: Hong Kong, which ranks in the top right quadrant, and Nigeria, which ranks in the bottom right quadrant. Both countries occupy an isolated position in the space, due to their high scores on the two-factor indexes. In both countries, many respondents report loving and universal behaviors towards the other, by donating money, actively participating in volunteer activities, or simply helping people in need. Hong Kong and Nigeria are distinguished by their divergent opinion about who should be cared for by this overabounding action. In Hong Kong, “the other” is the environment, seen in its purity and naturalness, threatened by pollution due to human activity; here, the common view is that the overabundance should be directed primarily to environmental protection and the fight against pollution and climate change. On the other hand, in Nigeria, the “other” is the poor, seen in conditions of need and extreme fragility; here, it is widely believed that donating money, time, and aid should alleviate the condition of extreme poverty that afflicts many people. Nigeria and Hong Kong are two landmarks due to the uniqueness of their World Love Index profile. They are labeled “The most social loving countries”.

Group 3 consists of 11 countries: Malaysia, Sweden, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Germany, Cyprus, Slovenia, Uzbekistan. Their World Love Index profile is similar to Hong Kong’s profile: they are characterized by positive scores on the dimension of overabundance and having a clear orientation to caring for the environment, as a priority. They are labeled “The countries with an environmental vocation”.

Group 4 consists of 6 countries: South Africa, Chile, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Iraq, and Ghana. Their World Love Index profile is similar to Nigeria’s profile: they are characterized by positive scores on the dimension of overabundance and having a strong sensitivity towards poverty and care for the neediest. They are labeled “The countries with a humanitarian vocation”.

Group 5 includes Australia, Netherlands, the USA, and New Zealand. They have very high scores on the dimension of overabundance. Nevertheless, they have low or zero scores on the second-factor index: their overabounding action has no specific beneficiaries; they stand in the middle between the countries devoted to protecting the environment and the countries devoted to helping the poor and people in need. They are concerned with giving but do not question who or what should receive this overabundance in priority. They are labeled “The countries of doing”.

Group 6 is made up of 10 countries: Belarus, Estonia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Peru, Russia, Mexico, Ecuador, China. They have negative scores on the overabounding action index, and at the same time, they show a modest sensitivity to environmental issues. In these areas of the world, respondents stated that they do little or nothing for others, even if that little should be spent on fighting pollution.

Group 7 specifies the profile of the sixth group. Here we find three countries: Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. They have low scores on the index of overabounding action, and, at the same time, they have very high scores on the second index, showing a strong inclination towards environmental protection issues. Here, people report the opinion that the environment should be protected in priority, revealing that they do little for it.

Group 8 is the biggest and includes Morocco, Palestine, Rwanda, Armenia, Romania, Uruguay, India, Argentina, Brazil, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Pakistan, Poland, Spain, and Georgia. In these countries, there is a lack of overabundance, and at the same time, they show a modest sensitivity to poverty issues. The countries of Group 9 are positioned in this same quadrant: Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan. In these areas of the world, there is no trace of overabundance, but the respondents have a marked sensitivity to benefiting the most fragile and defenseless people.

Groups 6, 7, 8, and 9 are labeled “Countries with a low disposition to the other”. In fact, they are located on the left-hand side of the factor plane, where there is no trace of social love. It is a space devoid of overabounding action, where there is only a generic reference to the environment or poverty issues. This is insufficient to fully grasp the multidimensionality of social love concept, qualified by the simultaneous presence of the overabundance and the priority for the benefit of others. Social love action fills the right-hand side of the factor plan, distinguishing countries sensitive to environmental issues (placed at the top) from the countries taking care of the poor and the neediest (placed at the bottom).

Conclusion

Rooting in the debate on how well-being can be operationalized by valuing relational dimension, this study proposes the World Love Index as an innovative measure of the capacity of people of taking care of others and the world. The Index has the aim of complementing the basket of plural and alternative well-being indicators. Considering such new accounting measures seems to be important, especially in times of today’s post-pandemic crisis. The appeals of renowned intellectuals show the urgency of a shift to regenerated humanism. Within this perspective, social love can be a sign of hope since it marks a transition towards a new social ecology highlighting the critical potential of people and communities.

In this sense, this study offers solid empirical evidence in determining the centrality of certain semantic aspects within the general and multi-dimensional concept of social love. The dimension of overabundance places the heart of the concept: a gesture of social love is a relational behavior, in which the actor-agent offers more than the situation requires; the act is neither due nor required; the individual spends him/herself for unknown others, without accounting for the effects of the action, with no expectation of reciprocity. However, the dimension of overabundance is not enough to establish a social love relationship among the people; this gesture must foremost benefit the recipient. This study shows that the dimensions of overabundance and care of others are the conceptual pillars of the social love concept, as theoretical reflection has evidenced (Boltanski, op. cit.; Iorio, op. cit.). This means that social love has effects not only on the daily lives of people but also on the solidarity of communities and civic life.

Moreover, this research strategy allows us to evaluate the position of the different countries with reference to the most relevant dimensions of social love: “Dimension of action: overabundance” and “Types of overabounding orientation”. It is thus possible to discriminate 55 countries based on different degrees of intensity for overabounding action and on different types of beneficiaries receive priority in a specific territorial context. The cluster analysis produced 9 groups; to be more concise, these groups can be reduced to 3, leaving out those countries where the people are reluctant to spend themselves for the other.

The countries with an environmental vocation see Hong Kong as their point of reference, a country with a clear profile: the overabundance is oriented to give priority to the environment, which is threatened by anthropic activity; the overabounding action is directed to fight against climate change and pollution, in defense of the environment and biodiversity.

Nigeria, on the other hand, can be considered a lighthouse for countries with a humanitarian vocation, because it is oriented to protect people living in poverty: the overabundance is aimed at providing support and relief to the poorest and most fragile people, who live at the margins of society; the overabounding action is aimed at solving the social and economic inequalities and fighting against the poverty.

The last group includes the countries of doing (Australia, the Netherlands, the USA, and New Zealand). These are territories where the intensity of overabounding action is high, even if this is not matched by an equally strong orientation towards the benefit of others. Here, it is not clear who deserves to receive benefit, in priority, from a widespread and unconditional action for the others. Placed between the countries where the health of the environment is taken to heart, and the countries where there is a strong commitment to combating the economic hardship of the poorest, the countries of doing join overabounding behaviors, showing an essentially equivalent propensity for both the environment and traditional poverty issues.

In sum, the analyses conducted have highlighted unexpected results that demonstrate the need to adopt an approach to measuring well-being that goes beyond GDP. As Fig. 2 shows, some developing countries in the group represented by Nigeria (Groups 2 and 4) are characterized by high levels of humanitarian social love. At the same time, a large group of countries whose representative is Hong Kong (Groups 1 and 3) are characterized by social love with a purely environmental vocation. Finally, the group of countries of doing also shows a high level of social love despite not having a humanitarian or environmentalist characterization.

Fig. 2
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The world map

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Social love assumes different connotations in high-income and low-income countries. This is obviously linked to economic welfare and consequent priorities: high-income countries are less concerned with poverty and more with the environmental unsustainability deriving from richness. Thus, if the relationship between GDP and social love may be negative or positive and needs more investigation, its outputs are always positive. Social love puts in place different mechanisms, whether public, civic, or private, for income redistribution which may mitigate the extent of inequality. The countries where social love is high are signifiers of hope providing new narratives of progress based on taking care of each other and nature.

Policy implications may be derived at different levels. Going beyond GDP means not only the need to find more humanitarian indicators able to measure the potential of people as active advocates for social transformation. It also means designing different policies not rooted in the notions of domestication or passive welfarism which create conditions of dependence on external support not engaging emergent community capacities. It means designing policies able to activate community-building processes and articulate bonds of solidarity and care. Differently, it means recognizing people’s critical potential. The hope for social progress and transformation lies in leveraging this potential. It is the hope to build a word based on the logic of social love.