Jacques Attali

Jacques José Mardoché Attali (born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant.

Very prolific writer, between 1969 and 2023, in 54 years, Attali published 86 books.

Attali served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991, and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1991 to 1993. In 1997, upon the request of education minister Claude Allègre, he proposed a reform of the higher education degrees system. From 2008 to 2010, he led the government committee on how to ignite the growth of the French economy, under President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Attali co-founded the European program EUREKA, dedicated to the development of new technologies. He also founded the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance, now called Positive Planet, and is the head of Attali & Associates (A&A), an international consultancy firm on strategy, corporate finance and venture capital. Interested in the arts, he has been nominated to serve on the board of the Musée d’Orsay. He has published more than fifty books, including Verbatim (1981), Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom (1999), and A Brief History of the Future (2006).

In 2009, Foreign Policy called him as one of the top 100 "global thinkers" in the world.

Jacques Attali was born on 1 November 1943 in Algiers (Algeria), with his twin brother Bernard Attali, in a Jewish family. His father, Simon Attali, is a self-educated person who achieved success in perfumery ("Bib et Bab" shop) in Algiers. He married Fernande Abécassis on 27 January 1943. On 11 February 1954, his mother gave birth to his sister, Fabienne. In 1956, two years after the beginning of the Algerian independence war (1954–1962), his father decided to move to Paris with his family.