There's no reason to believe that current prognostications about the future will be any more accurate than past ones, and many reasons to believe that they aren

There's no reason to believe that current prognostications about the future will be any more accurate than past ones, and many reasons to believe that they aren't. The demographic transition can be viewed as a failure of our adaptations, made during times when birth control and sex education were unavailable, and children were useful workers instead of expensive luxuries, to the modern world. Some people's adaptations have failed harder than others. The people who have 0-1 kids are being selected out; those who have more than 2 are expanding. Future generations will be descended from the latter group, not the former. Unless you believe that fertility is completely invulnerable to selection, genetic or memetic, this must lead to increased fertility, just as selecting for bigger dogs would lead to bigger dogs. There are already groups which are immune to the demographic transition - Hasidic Jews in the middle of NYC who have ~8 kids per couple, for example - and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change. And if evolution did turn out to be false and the demographic transition turned out to be permanent, there's no reason to believe that fertility rates would magically converge at 2.0 (replacement rate). If they stayed below replacement rate, eventually the human race would go extinct. That's a far more dire prediction than any Malthus ever made. If they started going up again, is there any reason to believe that they would stop at 2.0? And having read Malthus, I'd also bet that the author never has.