Whoever wrote the introduction to my edition remarked that Malthus is one of those few authors to become widely verbed. It's not usually good for an author when they become so-verbed. "Kafkaesque" is misused, "Platonic" is an insult, and "Malthusian" usually designates a very doom and gloom view of population. I don't think Malthus was particularly enthused about the ramifications of his theory, and those who confuse what an author argues is the case, with what the author hopes the case is, are not treating him too fairly. The argument is essentially this: Population increases (from empirical data of the late 18th century, and theoretical modelling) geometrically (exponentially). Food increases (from more such data) arithmetically. Geometric sequences always outpace arithmetic ones, so there will always be pressure from want of food in society. He spends the first few chapters outlining this, and then the rest of the book criticizing various opponents, especially Godwin and Condorcet, for failing to recognize impossibilities in their presumptions.

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?