Malthus was right and wrong. He was wrong about economic growth being linear (even then, it was a 0.5% per year exponential increase that just looked linear). The Industrial Revolution kicked in and now economic growth is (for the first time ever) faster than population growth. That change happened around 1850; until that point, per-person economic improvement was virtually nonexistent because population gobbled up any gains.
Economic growth has been faster-than-exponential as long as there have been humans. If you treat biological complexity or energy capture as the analytic extension of "economic growth" that goes back to the origin of life ~3.8 billion years ago: a faster-than-exponential curve that just happened to be very slow (but always getting faster) for 3.7999 billion years.
Now, we're also seeing population growth rates drop, due to causes cited by OP.
Malthus was right insofar as the stronger countries of Europe (Great Britain, Germany, Russia) spent the next 150 years viciously outsourcing their Malthusian catastrophes (probably without need to do so) to the weaker ones (Ireland, Poland) and other parts of the world.
Malthus didn't actually predict starvation. He predicted moral malfeasance (with his religious beliefs, this included birth control, although I wouldn't call that malfeasance) driven by population pressure, and that happened.
Humans are a mix of r-selective and K-selective impulses. Psychopathy is what happens when the r-selector within us is unchecked by K-selective conscience/fairness modules. The reason it is more common in men is that it conferred a stronger r-selective advantage in men (who could possess harems and "fan out") than in women (who are limited to about one child per fertile year, and 30 fertile years in a life).
Also, if you look at the "corporate paternalism" as more than metaphor, most people work in r-selective get-big-or-die gambits or large companies that have a lot of employees (children) but don't invest anything in them. Very few people work in K-selective enterprises that grow more slowly but invest in their people.
I don't think one can say, for sure, that the K-selector has won outright. I think that contest between the two sets of impulses still exists.
Much of how humans have imagined good and evil comes from the conflict (perhaps a neuroevolutionary arms race) between the r- and K-selective selves.