Is Population Growth Really the Problem?

Where I live, Puerto Rico, the population is in decline. I have read that the birth rate is declining in other nations as well, such as Japan. It is odd to me that there is much lamentation over this, when I had been taught that population growth was the cause of many of our problems.

Even Ebeneezer Scrooge believed it, when the world population was so much smaller.  “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”—from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

But if something is true, the opposite is also true. That means that things should be getting better here when the population is declining.

Guess what? It's not getting better.

This has caused me to rethink some of what was taught to me in school. I think there is a problem with the idea of blaming so many world problems on population growth. Maybe it isn't the number of people in the world, but the way we abuse and poorly administer its resources. Or it might be that faint hearts sound a retreat rather than face the future and innovate to overcome its challenges.

That would explain why population has frequently been blamed for problems when the focus really should be on restructuring or governments and replacing those who try and shift our focus away from the real causes of misery in the world.