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Isn't that similar to how European colonial empires were a net economic drain? And yet there was something, not measured by that economic equation, that made them want a "place in the sun".
Putting aside motivations like pride and competitiveness, there might be something similar to what Paul Graham wrote (I think), about allowing serendipity. Holing up and focusing on specializations may not be the best investment strategy. Maybe there's a place for trying a number of things that aren't likely to work, in case one of them takes off. (What would the world be like if the circa-1600 UK had decided that this "colonization" thing was economically inefficient?) Maybe it's like the social-capital version of an index fund, or hybridization? Possibly the increased scale provides more options in case something somewhere goes wrong, much like an insurance policy?
(There's room for a counter-argument here, about guaranteeing exposure to disease, political instability, and other problems of heterogeneity.)
I think there were profitable episodes and individual people who made a lot of money throughout, but for the most part most things were a financial drain after the mid-18th century. Even in the Caribbean you had in many cases the classic situation in which profits were privatized but ‘losses’ (paying for defenses like building forts, the various extremely expensive colonial wars, compensating slaveowners) were funded by government borrowing and in most cases taxes on the metropole. While England was much richer than the rest of Europe for almost all of the 19th century, that was probably more to do with the Industrial Revolution than the Empire, and at the height of empire in the early 1920s the UK wasn’t substantially (or at all in some cases) richer than other northwest European countries.
Even where states made a lot of money early on (again, more of an Iberian thing than an Anglo-French one) it was squandered pretty quickly. The Spanish obviously lost it all fighting the Dutch and French. The scale of the public losses are sometimes overstated because a lot of failed Anglo-French investment (eg. the colossal amount of money the British wasted in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Latin America generally) was private, but that was still a big economic drag. Plus, imperial preference never really worked because the British were worried about another 1776 and so from the early 1880s allowed the colonies to opt out or circumvent a lot of protectionist policy, which meant that the whole system never brought much wealth back to London.
There's another element: discovering wealth does not necessarily make you wealthier. Within 100 years of discovering the Cerro Rico at Potosi which essentially doubled the world's silver supply, the Spanish crown was serially bankrupt.
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All the major powers, except possibly the USA, have in-series declining populations who aren’t offered a better life in the colonies(far from it- colonies are shown to be poorer societies which degenerate into shitholes fast without massive subsidies), a major difference from Europe in 1850, and there’s also nothing at all anyone needs in the stars, unlike Victorian Britain which colonized because it was dependent on trade.
Indeed, except for China and Korea, every major nation with colonies is explicitly said to have declined. There are vague hints at ideological reasoning, but an intelligence focused account of a space war could surely round out the motivation behind a colonization effort which is explicitly noted to be an extremely expensive and excessive investment in creating elbow room for a declining population. The science qua physics is like a 10 on the mohs scale; a lack of explanation for major states making highly irrational economic decisions stands out against that backdrop.
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