So what words you are using for astronomers and their theories of stars and galaxies? After all, almost all of the events they observe and test their theories on have happened in the long, long past. If you don’t call it “prediction”, then what?
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.
