Mmm, China perfidiously stealing the hard-earned talent of Western engineers? I know just the solution! They should build an anti-communist self-defence wall:
We no longer wanted to stand by passively and see how doctors, engineers, and skilled workers were induced by refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man to give up their secure existence in the GDR and work in West Germany or West Berlin. These and other manipulations cost the GDR annual losses amounting to 3.5 thousand million marks.
Some fine historical irony. Of course, given the way the university system works in places like the US, there’s not even a good argument that this imposes costs on the public, who trains personnel only for them to leave and benefit some other state.
Maybe this is what Trump’s wall is for.
At a guess, it’s following older British norms, whereby a billion is what it is in other European languages (a million million) and a thousand million is a thousand million or, more pretentiously, a milliard. You’d have to ask the authors though.