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).

His father, Simon Attali, is a self-educated person who achieved success in perfumery ("Bib et Bab" shop) in Algiers.

in 1972, Attali received a PhD in economics from University Paris Dauphine, for a thesis written under the supervision of Alain Cotta.

In his laboratory in Dauphine, the IRIS, he gathered several young researchers Yves Stourdzé (who ran the European research program EUREKA co-founded by Jacques Attali), Jean-Hervé Lorenzi, and Érik Orsenna, but also leading figures in various fields (including journalism, mathematics, show business, financial analysis).

From this moment on, Jacques Attali wrote notes every evening for the attention of the French President, which dealt with economics, culture, politics, or the last book he read.

Attali then enlarged his circle of acquaintances to Raymond Barre, Jacques Delors, Philippe Séguin, Jean-Luc Lagardère, Antoine Riboud, Michel Serres, Coluche.

He advised the President to get Jean-Louis Bianco, Alain Boublil and several young, promising graduates from the École nationale d’administration (like François Hollande and Ségolène Royal) to join his team.

In 1997, upon the request of Claude Allègre, he proposed a reform of the tertiary education degree system which led to the implementation of the LMD model.

In 2008 and 2010, he was asked by then President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair a bipartisan commission aiming at proposing reforms to foster French economic growth.

He had initiated the idea of this institution in June 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in order to support the reconstruction of Eastern European countries.

In 1991, Attali invited Mikhail Gorbachev to the EBRD headquarters, in London, against the opinion of British Prime Minister John Major.

The Herald Tribune even published, on the front page, an article claiming (wrongly) that President Mitterrand had asked for the book to be withdrawn from sale.

François Mitterrand confirmed in a long interview that he had asked Attali to write this book, and acknowledged that he had proofread it and had been given the opportunity to make corrections.

In 1998, Attali founded Positive Planet, a non-profit organization which is active in more than 80 countries, employing over 500 staff, and provides funding, technical assistance and advisory services to 10,000 microfinance players and stakeholders.

The financial institution is a first step towards the establishment of a democratic world government, of which the European Union can be a laboratory, which was all laid to bare in his 1981 book Verbatim.

In 1994, he founded Attali & Associates (A&A), an international advisory firm which specializes in strategy consulting, corporate finance and venture capital to help companies' long-term development.

With Patrick Souillot, he created in 2012 a national organization following the model of the Fabrique Opéra Grenoble, which aims at coordinating the production of cooperative operas with the participation of students from vocational highschools.

On 24 July 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy appointed Attali to chair a bipartisan commission charged with studying "the bottlenecks that constrain growth".

The literary work of Attali covers a wide range of topics and almost every possible subject in the field of literature: mathematics, economic theory, essays, novels, biographies, memoirs, children's stories, and theater.

In order to accomplish this, he undertook the task of retelling the story of human activity and its various dimensions: music, time, property, France, nomadic life, health, the seas, modernity, global governance, love and death (Bruits, Histoires du temps, La nouvelle économie française, Chemin de sagesse, Au propre et au figuré, l'ordre cannibale, Consolations, l’homme nomade, Amours, Histoire de la modernité, Demain qui gouvernera le monde, Histoires de la mer).

Attali also reflected on the future of the concepts of socialism and altruism (La voie humaine, Fraternités) and advocated methods of personal growth (Survivre aux crises, Devenir soi).

In Bruits, in 1977, he announced what would later be the internet, YouTube, and the importance of musical practice; in La nouvelle économie française, in 1978, he discussed the coming emergence of the personal computer, hyper-surveillance and self-surveillance.

The focus of his biographical publishing is on retelling the lives of characters who disrupted world history by the strength of their ideas: Warburg, Pascal, Marx, Gandhi, Diderot, and all those for whom he wrote a short biography in Phares, such as Averroes, Aristotle, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno, Darwin.

More recently, he has chosen to combine crime novels with dystopia, imagining a reappearing police chief, whilst the action takes place in a near future period.