If you start from philosophical questions of mind and identity (e.g., substance dualism vs physicalism, etc.), it’s not hard to get to an argument that qualia a

If you start from philosophical questions of mind and identity (e.g., substance dualism vs physicalism, etc.), it’s not hard to get to an argument that qualia are neither substances nor physical identities but instead properties of systems (cf Whitehead), so you can ask not only “what is it like to be a bat,” but also “what is it like to be any system capable of qualia?” It’s possible that such systems could include societies, economies, corporations, and so on, depending on what you assume the criteria are for a qualia-capable system. (This is also how you get to the Gaia hypothesis, which sounds utterly crazy taken on its own, but almost axiomatic if you build it up from a systems approach to mental states with loose enough coupling and coherence restrictions). The kicker of this approach is that the modes of qualia or consciousness at different system levels are likely to be so completely alien and the causal mechanisms so hard to discern that you could never definitively answer the question of “what is it like to be an economy;” it’s as impossible as a neuron wondering what it’s like to be Proust eating his madeline. Scientifically, it’s virtually unfalsifiable but, if correct, it does have the delightful side-effect of turning social sciences such as economics from attempts to formulate natural “laws” to something more like efforts to psychoanalyze alien gods.