Bryan Norton, Robert Costanza and Richard C. Bishop (1998), 'The Evolution of Preferences: Why "Sovereign" Preferences may not Lead to Sustainable Policies and What to do About it', Ecological Economics, 24, pp. 193–211.

Conventional, neoclassical economics is based on assumptions that, while yielding useful models

for understanding the problems of efficient allocation of resources in the short term, are misleading and potentially dangerous in dealing with the long term consequences of economic choices. This problem arises more specifically in evaluating the impacts of various policies that are proposed to promote 'sustainable development', because the temporal horizon of sustainability analysis is

multi-generational. Sustainable development involves three hierarchically inter-related problems. These are maintaining: (I) a sustainable scale of the economy relative to its ecological life support system: (2) a fair distribution of resources and opportunities, not only among members of the current generation of humans, but also among present and future generations (and even in some formulations among humans and other species); and (3) an efficient allocation of resources over time that adequately accounts for natural capital (Daly, 1990).