It seems that history, if anything, has vindicated Malthus more than might be expected. The world population has increased arithmetically since around 1960, adding a billion roughly every 11 or 12 years. He did not expect the scientific improvements in food production during the Industrial Revolution and beyond, when the world was seeing exponential-like increase, but it is not quite fair to want him to be a prophet. I think a lot of people see overpopulation as a Bad Thing That Will Happen on the level of climate change. It is a very bad thing, but not an existential threat, and it's essentially unavoidable, it happened many times in the past, and will probably happen many times in the future. (In the future: that is not so easy to justify, but is a reasonable guess.) I simply don't think we've seen enough of modernity yet to make inferences about its stability. Being generous and benchmarking "modernity" at the Industrial Revolution, I would say we still haven't worked through all the cultural, economic, and political shocks that have to come from such an event. Especially given that about half of the world is still made up of developing countries, how reasonable is it really to say that we are at the end of history?

I'd be very interested if anyone knows of good books on population today. I'm not the biggest fan of purely quantitative analysis, or the linear-extrapolation school of data soothsayers, but of something that combines population analysis with a protracted study of all the societal factors which affect population, perhaps.