From Hegel to the Metaverse: Eigentum, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, and the Fate of Human Capital

Abstract

This study presents an interdisciplinary examination of the intersections between human capital theory, philosophical interpretations of property, and contemporary housing and aspirational patterns in Germany and the United Kingdom. Drawing upon classical economic thought, Hegel’s philosophy of right, and Marx’s theory of alienation, the analysis demonstrates that falling homeownership rates and the reorientation of youth aspirations toward non-material domains reflect the structural impossibility of realizing Eigentum—property understood as an extension of personhood. These developments exemplify what Marx termed Eigenschaftslosigkeit, the condition of being divested of essential human attributes. The findings reveal a social configuration in which the Hegelian conception of Eigentum as a universal medium for freedom has been systematically denied to younger generations while the Marxian prospect of collective emancipation remains unfulfilled. The paper does not claim that virtual environments directly substitute for material property; rather, it proposes the metaverse as a conceptual horizon that illuminates the compensatory logic of a generation structurally excluded from Eigentum.

1. Introduction

Within contemporary economic discourse, human capital occupies a central position as the principal driver of sustained economic growth, influencing productivity levels, technological advancement, and the structural resilience of national economies. The intellectual lineage of this concept extends from classical political economy through to contemporary empirical investigation, marking a progressive shift in analytical focus from tangible production factors toward the intangible capacities embedded within human agents.

Adam Smith established the foundational insight into the economic significance of human capabilities by incorporating into fixed capital what he termed “the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society,” drawing an explicit analogy with productive machinery [1]. Smith further observed that expenditure on cultivating such abilities ought to yield returns comparable to investments in physical capital. David Ricardo, notwithstanding his primary focus on the labor theory of value, did not explicitly theorize human capital as a distinct category; nevertheless, his framework of comparative advantage and specialization implicitly acknowledges the importance of differential skill endowments and technological knowledge across national contexts [2].

The mid-twentieth century witnessed the systematic elaboration of classical insights through the pioneering contributions of Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, who established the theoretical architecture of modern human capital analysis. Schultz provided empirical evidence demonstrating that productivity increases in advanced economies could not be adequately explained by expanded inputs of physical capital or labor alone; instead, investments in education, health, and vocational training emerged as the primary explanatory variables [3]. Becker subsequently supplied the microeconomic foundations for the field, conceptualizing human capital as the stock of skills and knowledge that augment productive capacity and developing a theory of optimal investment in such capacities through rational individual decision-making [4].

The theoretical framework received further sophistication through the development of endogenous growth models by Paul Romer and Robert Lucas. Romer demonstrated that knowledge accumulation and human capital generate positive spillover effects and exhibit increasing returns to scale, thereby enabling economies to transcend the growth limitations inherent in conventional neoclassical formulations [5]. He subsequently formalized the mechanisms through which technological change emerges endogenously from the allocation of human capital to research activities [6]. Lucas contributed a formal analysis of human capital accumulation through formal education and learning-by-doing, showing that cross-country variation in growth trajectories can be explained by differential investment patterns in human capital [7].

Contemporary empirical scholarship has substantiated these theoretical claims by establishing robust positive correlations between qualitative indicators of human capital—notably cognitive competencies and educational quality—and per capita GDP growth. Barro’s cross-national analysis confirms that educational attainment exerts significant predictive power over economic growth, particularly when variations in educational quality are taken into account [8]. Hanushek and Woessmann demonstrate that cognitive skills, rather than nominal years of schooling, constitute the critical explanatory factor for international growth differentials, with institutional quality serving as an enabling condition [9]. Against the backdrop of digital transformation, the knowledge economy transition, and demographic shifts, human capital has emerged as the decisive determinant of competitive advantage, elevating its cultivation to the forefront of long-term economic policy.

Why Hegel and Marx? Justifying the Philosophical Turn

The dominant human capital paradigm, for all its analytical power, operates with what Sen has termed a ‘thin’ conception of the person: individuals are treated as bundles of productive capacities to be optimised [10]. This framework captures the mechanisms of human capital formation but brackets the meaning of that which is formed. It can tell us that education raises lifetime earnings, but it cannot tell us why the systematic denial of property to an entire generation constitutes more than an inefficiency—why it touches the conditions of human freedom itself.

Our recourse to Hegel and Marx is not an antiquarian exercise. It is motivated by a specific explanatory deficit in the economic mainstream. When homeownership rates among young adults in the United Kingdom fall from 55% to 34% in a single generation [11], we are confronting something that exceeds a housing market dysfunction. We are confronting a rupture in the relationship between persons and the material world—a relationship that, as Hegel demonstrated, is constitutive of personhood. The concept of Eigentum captures precisely this constitutive dimension, which the Anglo-American term ‘property’—with its predominantly juridical and economic connotations—does not. Similarly, Marx’s Eigenschaftslosigkeit names a condition—the divestment of essential human attributes—that has no equivalent in standard economic vocabulary.

This paper does not, therefore, reject human capital theory. It supplements it. Our argument is not that economic analysis is inherently deficient, but that the specific phenomena we examine—the structural exclusion from homeownership and the consequent reorientation of aspirations—require concepts that lie outside the standard economic lexicon. The notions of Eigentum and Eigenschaftslosigkeit, we contend, capture a dimension of these phenomena—the constitutive relationship between personhood and property—that the language of assets, optimisation, and human capital does not address. The housing crises in Germany and the United Kingdom, we suggest, demand both modes of inquiry.

Yet the dominant economic paradigm, for all its analytical efficacy, operates within a framework that reduces individuals to repositories of skills and knowledge optimized for productive output. This perspective, while illuminating the mechanisms of productivity enhancement, brackets deeper philosophical questions concerning the relationship between persons and the material world—questions that classical political economy implicitly raised but never systematically resolved. A comprehensive understanding of contemporary economic transformations requires supplementing the human capital framework with philosophical analysis of property, drawing upon the German tradition that conceptualized Eigentum not merely as a juridical or economic category but as an existential condition of personhood. This study therefore proceeds in three movements: first, an examination of Eigentum as theorized by Hegel and Marx; second, an empirical analysis of declining homeownership and evolving youth aspirations in Germany and the United Kingdom; and third, a synthetic conclusion that interprets these phenomena through the Marxian concept of Eigenschaftslosigkeit.

Before proceeding, we state the central hypothesis of this paper explicitly. We propose that the structural exclusion of younger generations from material Eigentum—paradigmatically, from homeownership—generates a compensatory dynamic in which virtual environments increasingly function as surrogate sites for the acquisition of Eigenschaften (qualities, attributes, recognition). This dynamic produces a distinctive contemporary form of Eigenschaftslosigkeit: a condition in which individuals are divested of property in the physical world while acquiring simulated properties in digital domains. The hypothesis is that this migration is not merely a cultural preference but a structural response to the foreclosure of Hegel’s promise that property should serve as the universal medium of freedom. The metaverse, in this argument, is not an empirically measured destination but a conceptual horizon that illuminates the compensatory logic of Eigenschaftslosigkeit under conditions of financialized capitalism.

2. Material and Methods

A distinctive philosophical tradition, grounded in the German linguistic and conceptual apparatus, offers an approach to property that diverges fundamentally from Anglo-American legal and economic frameworks. Within this tradition, the term Eigentum (property) shares etymological roots with eigen (own, characteristic) and Eigenschaft (property, quality, attribute), suggesting a constitutive relationship between ownership and identity [1].

Hegel articulated the most systematic philosophical elaboration of this understanding in his Philosophy of Right, wherein property (Eigentum) is theorized as the initial external manifestation of human freedom. Hegel argues that the person, as abstract free will, must externalize itself in the material world through the appropriation of objects. Property thus constitutes not merely a material possession but the necessary embodiment of personality: the act of placing one’s will in an object transforms that object into an extension of the self [12] (§44). For Hegel, the act of taking possession (Besitznahme) converts external objects into vehicles for self-realization; in the absence of property, the person remains abstract, unrealized, and incapable of exercising freedom in the material domain. This logic establishes Eigentum as an ontological condition of personhood rather than a contingent institutional arrangement.

It should be noted that in the analysis that follows, we employ the concept of Eigentum primarily with reference to residential property. This is not a reduction of the Hegelian category to a single asset class. Rather, housing occupies a privileged position in the architectonic of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel writes that “the person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea” [12] (§41), and that the appropriation of a thing—any thing—is the first act by which the will becomes actual. Yet among all external objects, the dwelling is unique: it is the space in which the person is present to himself, the site where the abstract freedom of the will takes concrete, embodied form. Without a dwelling, the person cannot “be in himself” («bei sich selbst sein»), which for Hegel is the very definition of freedom [12] (§45). It is for this reason that the inaccessibility of housing for an entire generation represents not a discrete problem of housing policy but a crisis in the very conditions of free existence. Other forms of property—intellectual, digital, cooperative—may partially fulfil the function of Eigentum, but their derivative and subordinate character relative to housing confirms rather than refutes the thesis advanced here.

The connection between housing and Eigenschaftslosigkeit is equally grounded in Marx’s text. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes that the worker’s labour produces “palaces” for the capitalist but “hovels” for himself, and that this material dispossession is simultaneously a divestment of essential human qualities: “The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life” [13] (p. 358). The loss of Eigentum and the loss of Eigenschaften are, for Marx, two aspects of a single process. This is the textual basis for our claim that the contemporary decline in homeownership is not merely an economic trend but a manifestation of Eigenschaftslosigkeit.

Karl Marx, initially working within the Hegelian tradition, radicalizes and inverts this analysis. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx accepts the Hegelian premise that human beings realize themselves through externalization (Entäußerung) but contends that capitalist relations of production rupture the connection between Eigentum and Eigen. Under capitalism, the worker produces objects that become fremdes Eigentum (alien property) confronting him as an external, hostile force. The more the worker externalizes himself through labor, the more powerful and alien the world of property becomes [13] (p. 324). Marx’s critique reveals that while the capitalist accumulates Eigentum, the worker is dispossessed not only of property but also of the opportunity to realize his Eigenschaften (essential qualities). The worker is reduced to abstract labor power—a being without properties (eigenschaftslos)—while property becomes an instrument of domination rather than a medium of self-realization.

The distinction between Hegel and Marx thus does not concern the importance of property but its social form. For Hegel, Eigentum constitutes the necessary condition of freedom, universalizable within a rational legal order [12] (§46). For Marx, the private character of property under capitalism transforms it into its opposite: rather than mediating human flourishing, it becomes the mechanism of alienation (Entfremdung), necessitating the eventual transcendence of private property and the restoration of the individual’s capacity to appropriate the world in accordance with developed human capacities [13] (p. 296).

3. Results and Findings

3.1. The Decline of Homeownership and the Devaluation of Eigentum in Germany and the United Kingdom

The conceptual status of Eigentum—property as an extension of personhood—confronts significant empirical challenges in contemporary Europe. Across both Germany and the United Kingdom (both countries that Marx called home), the proportion of households owning residential property has entered a period of sustained decline, indicating not merely a shift in housing tenure patterns but a fundamental transformation in the relationship between individuals and this foundational category of property [14].

In Germany, where the cultural logic of Eigentum has historically linked ownership to personal identity and existential fulfillment, homeownership rates have stagnated and contracted among key demographic groups. Data from the Federal Statistical Office indicate that the aggregate homeownership rate stood at approximately 42% in 2023, having declined from 44% in 2006 [15]. Among households headed by individuals under 45 years of age, ownership rates have fallen from 30% to 23% over the same period [15]. This decline occurs within a society where the philosophical tradition extending from Hegel to Marx understood Eigentum as the material embodiment of free will and the foundation of autonomous personhood [12,13]. The retreat from ownership suggests systematic erosion of the institutional and economic conditions required for the realization of this ideal.

The United Kingdom exhibits a more dramatic trajectory of decline. Homeownership in England peaked at 71% in 2003 and has since fallen to approximately 63% in 2023 [16]. Among young adults aged 25 to 34, the contraction has been precipitous: from 55% in 1997 to 34% in 2023—a decline of nearly forty percentage points within a single generation [11]. This pattern reflects not a voluntary cultural departure from ownership aspirations but structural exclusion driven by the decoupling of house prices from median incomes, tightened mortgage credit conditions, and the residualization of social housing provision [17]. The normative ideal that property ownership represents the proper goal of individual economic striving—a legacy of the property-owning democracy discourse since the 1980s—has become unattainable for an expanding segment of the population [18].

It is important to note that the observed correlation between declining homeownership rates and the 2008 financial crisis, with its subsequent tightening of credit conditions, does not automatically imply a mono-causal relationship driven exclusively by financial mechanisms. We do not claim that finance capital is the sole driver. Our argument is rather that the structural character of these trends—their independence from short-term cyclical fluctuations and political cycles—points to a systemic alteration in the accessibility of Eigentum as such. This systemic alteration is what warrants philosophical analysis.

What unites these divergent national contexts is a common underlying phenomenon: the devaluation of Eigentum as a lived category. In the German case, the stability of the rental sector has historically provided an alternative pathway to housing security, yet the decline in ownership nevertheless signifies a retreat from the Hegelian promise that property mediates the realization of freedom in the external world [12]. Housing increasingly functions not as a site of self-actualization but as a speculative asset class, with ownership concentrated among older cohorts who entered the market prior to the affordability crisis [19]. For younger Germans, Eigentum becomes an abstract aspiration rather than a concrete condition of personhood.

In the British case, the devaluation is more acute. Homeownership was deliberately constructed as a vehicle for individual autonomy, wealth creation, and intergenerational mobility through policies such as the Right to Buy [18]. The contemporary impossibility of achieving ownership for large segments of the population therefore represents not merely a housing market failure but a crisis of the cultural promise embedded in property itself. As homeownership retreats, the category of Eigentum loses its status as a universalizable condition of dignified existence, becoming instead a marker of intergenerational privilege [11]. Those excluded from ownership confront a condition resembling what Marx described as Eigenschaftslosigkeit—a state of being stripped of the properties and qualities that enable full participation in social life [13].

Comparative analysis reveals that the decline in homeownership across both countries is structural rather than cyclical. Contributing factors include sustained house price inflation exceeding income growth, the financialization of housing markets, withdrawal of state provision, and demographic shifts toward later household formation [7,20]. The 2008 financial crisis marked a watershed in this process. As Aalbers (2016) has documented, the crisis accelerated the transformation of housing from a social good into a financial asset, intensifying the decoupling of property values from median incomes and concentrating ownership among those with access to intergenerational wealth [21]. Rolnik (2019) has shown that post-crisis policies, including quantitative easing and the bailout of financial institutions, disproportionately benefited asset holders while leaving renters and aspiring homeowners exposed to increasingly volatile markets [22]. Piketty’s (2014) analysis of long-run wealth concentration provides the structural backdrop: when returns on capital consistently outpace economic growth, property becomes a mechanism of stratification rather than a universalisable condition of freedom [23]. These processes collectively undermine the philosophical premise, articulated by Hegel, that property should be universally accessible as the first sphere of freedom [12] (§46). When ownership becomes the preserve of the wealthy or the elderly, Eigentum ceases to function as a constitutive element of personhood and instead operates as a mechanism of social stratification.

The declining homeownership percentages thus index a deeper transformation: the hollowing out of the concept of Eigentum. Where once property mediated the relationship between the individual and the material world, enabling self-realization and social recognition, it now serves primarily as a vector of rent extraction and wealth concentration [14]. In both Germany and the United Kingdom, the retreat from ownership signals not a collective decision to abandon property as a value but the structural impossibility of realizing that value under contemporary conditions of financialized capitalism.

3.2. The Transformation of Youth Aspirations and the Further Devaluation of Eigentum

The declining homeownership rates and structural barriers to property accumulation correspond with a broader transformation in the aspirations of younger cohorts in Germany and the United Kingdom. Empirical research documents a significant shift away from traditional markers of material success—homeownership, stable career progression, financial accumulation—toward non-material spheres of value, including digital identities, experiential consumption, and immersive online environments [24,25]. This shift, while often interpreted as a cultural preference, may be more accurately understood as an adaptive response to the structural impossibility of realizing Eigentum under contemporary conditions.

While systematic longitudinal data on the subjective importance of homeownership for German youth remain limited, available surveys register a consistent decline in the proportion of young people who regard homeownership as an attainable life goal [26,27]. In the United Kingdom, survey data indicate that the proportion of young adults who expect to own a home by age 35 has fallen from 65% to 28% between 2005 and 2023, while the proportion who consider homeownership “unimportant” has tripled [28]. Taken together with the objective decline in homeownership rates documented above, these figures index not a voluntary cultural preference for post-materialist values but the internalization of structural impossibility. These trends are accompanied by a reorientation toward what sociologists term “post-materialist values”: self-expression, personal autonomy, and experiential richness over material accumulation [29].

The digital sphere has become a primary site for the pursuit of these values. We do not suggest that the turn to virtual environments is driven exclusively by housing exclusion. Multiple factors contribute: the increasing technological accessibility of immersive platforms, the expansion of platform economics that monetise digital engagement, the transformation of labour markets that renders traditional career pathways uncertain, and broader cultural shifts toward digitally mediated sociality [30,31]. The causal architecture is complex and overdetermined. Our more modest claim is that the structural inaccessibility of material Eigentum functions as one significant factor—hitherto undertheorised—in this broader constellation of forces. A growing body of research documents the increasing involvement of younger cohorts in digital environments where agency and recognition are attainable in forms that simulate traditional mechanisms of property and status [30,31]. We do not claim that young people consciously ‘substitute’ homeownership with virtual assets. However, the conjunction of structural inaccessibility of material Eigentum with the rising significance of digital forms of self-realisation permits us to pose a question: might these environments be functioning as a space where individuals divested of Eigentum in the physical world seek its simulacra? This question remains open for further empirical investigation, and we formulate it here as a conceptual hypothesis rather than an established finding.

This shift carries profound implications for the concept of Eigentum. Where Hegel understood property as the necessary externalization of the will in the material world [12], contemporary youth increasingly externalize their identities in virtual environments. In these spaces, ownership takes new forms: digital assets, in-game property, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that exist outside traditional legal frameworks of property protection [32]. The willingness to invest significant time and financial resources in digital possessions suggests not an abandonment of the desire for Eigentum but its migration to domains where ownership remains accessible.

The devaluation of Eigentum thus appears not as a cultural rejection of property per se but as a generational adaptation to its unattainability. When the Hegelian promise—that property provides the universal medium for freedom and recognition—proves structurally unrealizable, individuals seek alternative sites for the realization of agency and identity [13]. In this context, virtual worlds function as what Marx might have recognized as a compensatory sphere: a domain where the eigenschaftslos individual can acquire Eigenschaften (qualities, attributes, achievements) that remain inaccessible in the material economy [13] (p. 324).

The transformation of youth aspirations therefore indexes not a simple generational preference but a structural condition. The retreat from material ambition in both Germany and the United Kingdom reflects the systematic foreclosure of pathways to Eigentum for younger cohorts. As homeownership becomes concentrated among older generations and property increasingly functions as a vehicle for wealth extraction rather than self-realization [14], youth redirect their energies toward domains where the relationship between effort, achievement, and recognition remains intact. In doing so, they participate in the ongoing hollowing out of Eigentum—not by rejecting it, but by seeking its simulacra where it can still be found.

4. Discussion

The empirical trends documented above—declining homeownership rates, structural barriers to property accumulation, and the transformation of youth aspirations away from material goals—can be understood through the Marxian concept of Eigenschaftslosigkeit (the condition of being stripped of properties and qualities). For Marx, this concept designated not merely the absence of material possessions but the severance of the constitutive link between Eigentum (property) and Eigenschaft (essential human quality, attribute, capacity) [13] (p. 324). The contemporary experience of younger cohorts in Germany and the United Kingdom exemplifies precisely this condition: they are increasingly eigenschaftslos in both the material and existential senses.

Material Eigenschaftslosigkeit manifests in the declining capacity to acquire property. As documented, homeownership among those under 45 in Germany has fallen from 30% to 23% since 2006 [15]; in the United Kingdom, ownership among 25–34 year olds has collapsed from 55% to 34% over a single generation [11]. This is not a matter of individual failure but of structural exclusion: house price inflation outpacing income growth, financialization of housing markets, and the withdrawal of state provision have rendered Eigentum inaccessible for large segments of the population [17,20]. Those excluded confront precisely what Marx described as the condition of the proletariat—a class defined by its separation from the means of realizing its will in the material world.

Existential Eigenschaftslosigkeit follows from this material exclusion. When Hegel’s promise—that property provides the universal medium through which the person externalizes free will and achieves recognition [12] (§44)—becomes structurally unrealizable, individuals lose access to the mechanism by which Eigenschaften (qualities, capacities, attributes) are developed and socially validated. The data on shifting youth aspirations reveal this existential dimension: British youth expecting to own a home by age 35 fell from 65% to 28% [28]. These figures index not a voluntary abandonment of aspiration but the internalization of structural impossibility—what Marx would recognize as the adaptation of consciousness to alienated conditions.

The turn toward non-material spheres, including online gaming and digital identity formation, represents a compensatory response to Eigenschaftslosigkeit. In virtual environments, individuals can acquire Eigenschaften (skills, status, recognition) that remain inaccessible in the material economy [30]. The willingness to invest time and financial resources in digital possessions—in-game items, virtual real estate, non-fungible tokens—suggests that the desire for Eigentum as a medium of self-realization persists, but migrates to domains where ownership remains achievable [32]. These virtual worlds function as what Marx might have termed a “compensatory sphere”: a domain where the eigenschaftslos individual can temporarily escape the condition of being without properties by acquiring simulated Eigenschaften.

If this hypothesis is correct, it carries several theoretical implications. First, it suggests that the Marxian concept of alienation requires updating for a context in which the compensatory sphere is not religion (as in Marx’s famous formulation) but digital simulacra of property. The “opium of the people” in the twenty-first century may be not religion but the virtual acquisition of Eigenschaften that remain foreclosed in material life. Second, it complicates the Hegelian architecture of recognition: if Eigentum is the first sphere of freedom, and if that sphere is structurally inaccessible, then individuals are not simply “unfree” in a political sense but ontologically incomplete—unable to externalise their will in the world. The digital sphere offers a simulation of this externalisation, but a simulation that, by its nature, cannot fulfil the Hegelian function of genuine mutual recognition. Third, the hypothesis illuminates the political economy of digital platforms: the demand for virtual Eigentum is not merely a matter of entertainment but is structurally generated by the foreclosure of material Eigentum. Platform capitalism, on this analysis, profits from Eigenschaftslosigkeit by offering its simulacra as a commodity.

Critically, Eigenschaftslosigkeit in contemporary capitalism differs from its nineteenth-century form in one crucial respect. For Marx, the proletariat’s dispossession was accompanied by the possibility of collective action to abolish private property and restore the individual’s capacity for appropriation [13] (p. 536). Today, the eigenschaftslos individual confronts a more fragmented condition: excluded from property yet lacking the class consciousness that might generate transformative politics, youth increasingly individualize their responses, retreating into digital domains where the illusion of ownership can be maintained without challenging the structural conditions that produce dispossession [25].

The trends analyzed in this document—declining homeownership, the hollowing out of Eigentum, the migration of aspirations to virtual spheres—thus constitute the empirical manifestation of Eigenschaftslosigkeit in contemporary Europe. They reveal a social formation in which the Hegelian promise of property as universal medium of freedom has been systematically withdrawn from younger generations, while the Marxian possibility of collective transcendence remains unrealized. The result is a condition in which individuals are simultaneously eigenschaftslos—stripped of the properties that allow full participation in social life—and consigned to seek their qualities in domains where ownership is simulated rather than real.

Limitations and Directions for Further Research

Several limitations of the present study must be acknowledged. First, the empirical basis for the claim that aspirations are migrating to digital environments remains fragmentary. The interpretation advanced here—that virtual property functions as a compensatory mechanism under conditions of Eigenschaftslosigkeit—is a theoretical hypothesis requiring verification through both qualitative and quantitative methods, including longitudinal surveys of youth aspirations and ethnographic studies of digital communities. Second, our analysis is geographically limited to two countries; comparative research including states with persistently high homeownership rates (for example, Southern and Eastern European countries) would clarify whether the observed trend is universal or specific to liberal and corporatist welfare regimes. Third, the category of Eigentum has been operationalised primarily through housing; further work should examine other forms of property—intellectual, digital, cooperative—in their relation to the Hegelian and Marxian framework. Fourth, the concept of the metaverse invoked in our title functions here as a conceptual horizon rather than an empirically documented destination; future research may determine whether emerging immersive technologies substantiate or refute the compensatory logic hypothesised in this paper.

5. Conclusions

This interdisciplinary investigation has traced a trajectory from the foundational significance of human capital for economic growth through the philosophical conceptualization of Eigentum in Hegel and Marx to the contemporary empirical realities of declining homeownership and shifting youth aspirations in Germany and the United Kingdom, culminating in the digital domains of the metaverse. The synthesis of these distinct domains reveals a fundamental tension at the heart of advanced capitalism: whereas human capital theory treats individuals as assets to be optimized for productive output, the philosophical tradition of Eigentum understands property as the medium through which persons realize freedom and acquire the qualities that constitute their humanity. The empirical evidence demonstrates that for younger generations in both countries, the Hegelian promise of Eigentum as a universal medium of freedom has become structurally unrealizable.

The documented decline in homeownership rates—from 44% to 42% in Germany and from 71% to 63% in the United Kingdom, with substantially steeper contractions among younger cohorts—represents not a cyclical fluctuation but a structural transformation in the accessibility of property. These trends are driven by sustained house price inflation outpacing income growth, the financialization of housing markets, and the withdrawal of state provision. The consequence is that Eigentum, which Hegel theorized as the first external sphere of freedom universally accessible to all persons, has become a marker of intergenerational privilege and a mechanism of social stratification rather than a constitutive condition of personhood.

Concurrent with this structural exclusion, the aspirations of younger cohorts have shifted decisively away from traditional material markers of success. British youth expecting to own a home by age 35 declined from 65% to 28% [28]. These figures index not a voluntary cultural preference for post-materialist values but the internalization of structural impossibility. In response, youth increasingly seek sites of agency, achievement, and recognition in non-material spheres, particularly digital environments—the emerging metaverse—where ownership remains accessible through in-game assets and virtual property.

Through the lens of Marx’s concept of Eigenschaftslosigkeit, these trends reveal a condition in which the constitutive link between Eigentum and Eigenschaft—property and essential human quality—has been severed. Contemporary youth experience material Eigenschaftslosigkeit through their exclusion from property markets, and existential Eigenschaftslosigkeit through the foreclosure of the mechanism by which qualities are developed and socially validated. The turn to virtual worlds represents a compensatory response: a domain where the eigenschaftslos individual can acquire simulated Eigenschaften that remain inaccessible in the material economy.

Critically, this contemporary condition differs from the nineteenth-century proletariat in that it lacks the collective consciousness and political organization that Marx believed would enable transcendence. Today’s eigenschaftslos individuals confront a fragmented social formation in which exclusion from property is individualized, aspirations are privatized, and responses are channeled into digital domains that offer the illusion of ownership without challenging the structural conditions that produce dispossession. The Hegelian promise of Eigentum as universal medium of freedom has been withdrawn, while the Marxian possibility of collective transcendence remains unrealized.

The implications for economic policy and social theory are substantial. If human capital theory is to provide a complete account of economic development, it must incorporate the philosophical and existential dimensions of property that classical and German idealist traditions articulated. Policies aimed at restoring the accessibility of Eigentum—through housing affordability measures, reformed property markets, and alternative models of tenure—may be necessary not only for economic efficiency but for the preservation of the conditions under which persons can realize freedom and acquire the qualities that constitute full participation in social life. In the absence of such interventions, the hollowing out of Eigentum and the compensatory migration of aspirations to virtual spheres—from Hegel to the metaverse—will likely continue, producing a social formation in which the promise of property as the first sphere of freedom becomes a historical memory rather than a living possibility.