The crucial issue is not when the event happened chronologically, but rather whether you have knowledge of the event. If you have knowledge, then indeed it is not prediction. However, in Malthus time, there was very, very little historical econometric data available.

The point here is that if you judge Malthus by quality of his predictions for immediate future, then yes, they turned out badly. However, that’s not because his model was wrong, but rather because some of his assumptions, that have been valid for entirety of the past history before him, have just stopped being valid anymore.

We devised ways to mitigate the problems associated with population growth, but we have not solved it: the fundamental logic of Malthus is still very much valid. The carrying capacity of Earth may be much larger than he thought: it may be 50 billion, or 100, or 500 (but probably not 1 trillion), some people surely have created an analysis to get a good estimate given current technology and available land. But, make no mistake, it is very much finite. The good news is that with current trends in population growth, we aren’t likely to hit it in the next few hundred of years.