While intelligent people around the world naturally embrace the notion of sustainable development, strongly emphasize the need to safeguard the interests of future generations, and strive to fulfill the normative obligation of intergenerational equity, it is apparent that most personal, business and community decisions continue to be made based purely on the desire to achieve maximum short-term benefits. This generates contradiction between the normative ideas defined at the political level and the reality of actions in daily life. This chapter explains the potential causes of such a contradiction. The theory of this chapter is that people using the norm set of ‘sustainable development,’ ‘rights of future generations,’ and ‘intergenerational equity’ have failed to fully explore these norms and define the limitations and implications of their practical application. The problems will be explained through concepts and interrelations of economics.