Jacques Attali (French: [?ak atali]; born 1 November 1943) is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who 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 in 1991-1993.
In 1997, upon the request of education minister Claude Allègre, he proposed a reform of the higher education degrees system.
In 2008-2010, 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 and is the head of Attali & Associates (A&A), an international consultancy firm on strategy, corporate finance and venture capital.
He has published more than fifty books, including 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 recognized him as one of the top 100 "global thinkers" in the world.