> And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.

That's a bit unfair to Malthus though; sure it was the enlightenment, but all he could rationally go on was to assume that the last 2000 or so years of civilization would be similar to the next, in terms of food and population growth.

What would be abstract would be to make the assumption that unprecedented technological advancement would be made in the next hundred years, bordering on ( to what Malthus would be) magic. You can assume any problem will be solved if you also assume a technology will be invented to fix it. But that's not a reasonable approach to make if you have no reason to believe it is possible.

I agree he wasn't able to anticipate technological changes or the impact they would have, but the response to that isn't to simply insist his theory is literally still true just because he tried his best. I'm not suggesting he could or should have done that, but I don't have to have that expectation to nevertheless note, correctly, that it's not a model of the population dynamics we actually see.