The latest figures from Germany show that apprentices, on average, earned 1,238 euros gross per month in April 2024. Women earned about 1,302 euros and men about 1,187 euros, revealing a gender gap that largely mirrors differences in the occupations they enter. In health and nursing trades, where women are more prevalent, the average is around 1,310 euros; shipbuilding trades sit above the general average at roughly 1,236 euros; crafts average about 1,008 euros; and arts-related fields such as music, photography, and graphic design average around 914 euros. Wages rise with firm size: apprentices in firms with fewer than ten employees earn about 929 euros; firms with 50–99 employees about 1,083 euros; and firms with 1,000 or more employees about 1,494 euros. Special one-off payments such as vacation or Christmas bonuses are not included, and apprentices account for roughly 3.8% of all employees.

What these numbers reveal to me, with the humility born of years spent observing how order arises, is a portrait of a market system at work, disciplined by the price mechanism and the dispersed knowledge of countless buyers and sellers of skills. The gender gap is not a mere verbal squabble about fairness; it is a map of occupational choice, signaling, opportunity costs, and the relative scarcity of certain talents in particular trades. When more women train in health and nursing, wages reflect the demand and productivity associated with those paths. When bigger firms pay more, the signal is loud and clear: with larger organizations come greater opportunities for training investment, economies of scale in education, and the ability to bear the upfront costs of molding talent. The market distributes apprenticeships across sectors with a rough justice—not perfect, perhaps, but far more adaptable and informative than any central directive could be.

To my mind, these data reaffirm a fundamental truth: society learns best when it relies on voluntary exchanges, competition, and decentralized decision-making to align training with the evolving needs of the economy. Attempts to erase pay differentials across occupations by fiat would suppress the very signals that guide young people toward paths where their talents can flourish and where firms can discover, reward, and cultivate productive skills. The price of a skill is not merely what a firm pays today, but what future productivity that skill enables. The dynamiс of wage variation across industries, and the greater payoff for those in larger firms who invest in training, are not distortions to be corrected by planners; they are the consequences of a complex order that only a free, competitive system can reveal and sustain.

Thus the lesson is not to chase uniformity, but to strengthen the institutions that make this price system work: broad access to capable training, protection of the rule of law so contracts and agreements are reliable, and a general climate in which individuals, firms, and communities can experiment within a framework that respects liberty. If we insist on harmonizing outcomes instead of allowing voluntary exchange to reward genuine differences in skill and effort, we hollow out the very mechanism by which society discovers new ways to train, to innovate, and to prosper.