The perceptions on well-being and societal progress are influenced also by the quantitative indicators and measures used in the measurement, presentation and semantics of discussing these issues. The article presents a novel generic statistical measure S-time-distance, with clear interpretability that delivers a broader concept to look at data, to understand and compare situations. This methodology can provide a new insight to many problems, an additional statistical measure, and a presentation tool for policy analysis and debate expressed in time units, readily understood by policy makers, media and general public. The benefits of this new view in comparisons, competitiveness issues, benchmarking, target setting and monitoring for economic, employment, social, R&D and environment indicators at the world, OECD, EU, country, regional, city, sector, socio-economic groups, company, project, household and individual levels could be immediately applied to a wide variety of substantive fields at macro and micro levels using existing data and indicator systems from international, national, state, city and local sources. These suggestions are illustrated by comparisons between EU15 and USA.