No Population Bomb

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.

First, regarding absolute human numbers, we do have too much, mostly because we are rapidly using up fossil resources (not only fuel, but also fertilizers), and some important ones already peaked (phosphorous for example).

But I don't believe that making your population decline fixes things, it only create other problems, the solution for the problem that I mentioned last, is develop more technology.

Malthus was right on his diagnostic, wrong in the solution (please, stop blabbering that Malthus is some stupid dude that is wrong, even on school I heard that, more than once, by several different teachers in several different grades), Malthus was absolutely correct in his calculations, he only did not accounted for the mining of phosphorous (that is one of the major enablers of green revolution).

Now we are running out of phosphorous and energy, and our food will return to levels Malthus calculated, unless we figure new tech, I hope someone does so soon.

Now regarding declining fertility levels... This is a problem too.

In history, there are several accounts of prosperous civilizations that had declining fertility, and all of them collapsed (usually when fertility reached around 1.3 per women). Several of the current western world problems are related to that, the need of external wars to keep some income flow (alright, no major powers are at war... between themselves, but how much wars US, France, etc... are involved with other smaller countries and forces? Even Brazil that is not developed is currently participating in a occupation force in Haiti and in civil war, although the media refuse to count the latter), debt problems, specially coming from welfare programs and wars, economies that are following their population numbers (thus we have Japan for example with economy declining with the same speed that their population is), and a increase in far right and far left party powers (example: brazillian military dictatorship apologists never been stronger, Greek far-right went from having no votes in parliament to 7%, and a estimated 35% in next election, Japan also has a new far-right nationalist party that got some respectable votes, the rise of Tea Party in US and Democrats steering leftward...)

And some groups, know of all this, and have a plan to take over when they can... The most famous one being Al Quaeda (that is the Arab translation of the name of Isaac Asimov books The Foundation, and it was known that Bin Laden was fan of the series). Al Quaeda is clearly aiming to teach their followers to keep a high fertility rate, so that they can conquer developed nations when they collapse under their own bureaucracy and population decline.

All those advocating that to fix the first problem I mentioned (peek resources), don't realize that by doing that, other nations still have population increasing, some of them will collapse because of it and cause further problems for everyone (and most likely will ignore the attempts of developed nations to stop their own population decline), and other nations are increasing in population on purpose, knowing well of its military effects, and will use it against any fool that voluntarily decline his population and ends struggling to keep itself up.

Africa (at least, sub-Saharan) is actually doing better now than in the past. The Islamic world is the big laggard. A lot of this was due to the cold war legacy, though (same in Africa), so there's some reason to be optimistic in both.

India's recent success I'd put down to ending some stupid socialist policies in the 1990s, which were also fairly tied to the cold war (and personal preferences of early leaders). And in Asia, a lot of the problems were also due to communism or weird military dictatorships propped up by communism (absent the cold war, I really hope the US would have wanted Suharto, Marcos, etc. hanging from gallows vs. giving them billions in support).

There's also some selection bias in my crystal ball in that I've spent more time in places which were objectively superior in 1975 (Iraq, Afghanistan, certain parts of N.A., etc.) to 1990-2013.