If you're living near Malthusian equilibrium, there's probably no smiling involved. Not even the poorest people on Earth are usually living close to that point. In fact, I'm not really sure any modern humans ever have.

You seem to be interpreting Malthusian equilibrium in an odd way, as being at starvation or something. An equilibrium is simply when the population is not growing, when deaths equal births, with many possible permutations and variations. Why aren't the poorest people either currently or historically at equilibriums? In Farewell to Alms, Clark cites examples of how societies can raise per capita welfare in an equilibrium through methods like infanticide (China and the Polynesian islands) or poor sanitation & public health (England).