Rose Friedman, Economist and Collaborator, Dies at 98

By Bruce Weber

Rose Friedman, a free-market economist whose extraordinary collaboration with her husband, Milton, proved essential to his Nobel-prize-winning career, died Tuesday at her home in Davis, Calif. Her birth records have been lost, but her family said she was probably 98.

The cause was heart failure, according to a statement approved by the family and issued by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, founded by Milton and Rose Friedman in 1996 to promote school vouchers and other school-choice policies.

Rose Director, as she was known after her family emigrated to the United States from Russia, met Milton Friedman in 1932 when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago. They wed six years later, and their marriage lasted 68 years, until Mr. Friedman's death in 2006.

A Nobel laureate and a giant of 20th-century economics, Mr. Friedman was a libertarian thinker who believed that government had an obligation to clear a path for markets and that economic freedom was crucial to a free society. His work provided a fundamental stanchion of the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the administration of Margaret Thatcher in Britain.

"On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood," he wrote in his influential 1962 manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," "so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom." The book was written with the assistance of his wife, to whom Mr. Friedman never wavered in giving full credit as a collaborator. Ms. Friedman's early economics research on consumer spending data found its way into her husband's early book "A Theory of the Consumption Function."

They wrote other books together, including "Free to Choose" (1980), an explication of free-market theory for a general audience, which was published in conjunction with a 10-part series on the Public Broadcasting Service; "The Tyranny of the Status Quo," an argument for amending the Constitution to constrain the scope of government (1982); and "Two Lucky People" (1998), a dual memoir, which discusses their remarkable partnership.

"Econ-nerds through and through," David Brooks called the couple, reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review and citing Mr. Friedman's wistful remark, "I can recall many a pleasant summer evening discussing consumption data and theory in front of a blazing fire."

They were known for being both romantically and intellectually suited to each other, often appearing in public holding hands, and though often debating - Ms. Friedman was known as the less compromising of the two - rarely, if ever bickering. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2006, only a few months before her husband died, Ms. Friedman said the 2003 invasion of Iraq created the first major argument of their life together. She was in favor; he was not.

"We have disagreed on little things, obviously - such as, I don't want to go out to dinner, he wants to go out - but big issues, this is the first one," she said. Ms. Friedman's contribution to the couple's work was "not so much in technical economic writing, but on the policy side," said Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics at the University of Chicago, who was a student of Mr. Friedman's and a longtime friend of the couple. "It was an extremely close intellectual fellowship, and she was not someone who got credit for things she didn't do. They discussed ideas constantly. Her feelings about the importance of private markets, opposition to big government, were even stronger than his. Her lasting influence will be as a collaborator, but she was a major contributor to the collaboration, and that's a significant legacy."

She was born in a village in what is now Ukraine, probably in the month of December, either in 1911, as she recalled in "Two Lucky People," or 1910, as her family said in the statement released this week. When she was 2, just before the onset of World War I, her family joined many other Jews in leaving Russia for the United States. They settled in Portland, Ore., where her father was a peddler and later owned a small general store. She spent two years at Reed College in Portland before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she earned a bachelor's degree, later completing all the required work for a Ph.D. except a dissertation.

Ms. Friedman is survived by a daughter, Janet; a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great- grandchildren.

"I was smart enough to know that he was smarter," Ms. Friedman said about her husband in a 1999 interview with The American Enterprise. Asked if she ever felt overshadowed, she responded: "No, I've always felt that I'm responsible for at least half of what he's gotten."

She added: "Every time he had to go somewhere to change his job, I gave up my job. I didn't feel that I was giving up anything. It seemed to me that that was the way it should be. He was the main income-bringer. It was his profession that was important. So I never felt neglected; I feel that I have much of the responsibility for his success."

From: The New York Times
Published: August 18, 2009

The Netflix prize winners were announced in September. More details below:

"Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest" By Steve Lohr

Update | 1:45 p.m. Adding details announced Monday about the extremely close finish to the contest. Netflix, the movie rental company, has decided its million-dollar-prize competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one.

The company's challenge, begun in October 2006, was both geeky and formidable: come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix's in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.

The winner, formally announced Monday morning, is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. The multinational team calls itself BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos. The group - a merger of teams - was the longtime frontrunner in the contest, and in late June it finally surpassed the 10 percent barrier. Under the rules of the contest, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.

That, in turn, prompted a wave of mergers among competing teams, who joined forces at the last minute to try to top the leader. In late July, Netflix declared the contest over and said two teams had passed the 10- percent threshold, BellKor and the Ensemble, a global alliance with some 30 members. Netflix publicly said the finish was too close to call. But Netflix officials at the time privately informed BellKor it had won. Though further review of the algorithms by expert judges was needed, it certainly seemed BellKor was the winner, as it turned out to be.

But the race was even closer than had been thought, as Netflix's chief executive, Reed Hastings, explained for the first time at a press conference in New York on Monday. The BellKor team presented its final submission 20 minutes before the deadline, Mr. Hastings said. Then, just before time ran out, The Ensemble made its last entry. The two were a dead tie, mathematically. But under contest rules, when there is a tie, the first team past the post wins. "That 20 minutes was worth $1 million," Mr. Hastings said.

The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set - 100 million movie ratings - and the challenges of large-scale predictive modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

The way teams came together, especially late in the contest, and the improved results that were achieved suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges. That certainly seemed to be a principal lesson for the winners. The blending of different statistical and machine-learning techniques "only works well if you combine models that approach the problem differently," said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of the Bellkor team. "That's why collaboration has been so effective, because different people approach problems differently."

Yet the sort of sophisticated teamwork deployed in the Netflix contest, it seems, is a tricky business. Over three years, thousands of teams from 186 countries made submissions. Yet only two could breach the 10- percent hurdle. "Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it's very, very difficult," said Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble. "Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don't work."

The data set for the first contest was 100 million movie ratings, with the personally identifying information stripped off. Contestants worked with the data to try to predict what movies particular customers would prefer, and then their predictions were compared with how the customers actually did rate those movies later, on a scale of one to five stars.

The new contest is going to present the contestants with demographic and behavioral data, and they will be asked to model individuals' "taste profiles," the company said. The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters' ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies. Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months.

The payoff for Netflix? "Accurately predicting the movies Netflix members will love is a key component of our service," said Neil Hunt, chief product officer.

To read the article in it's entirety, click here.

From The New York Times, September 21st 2009.

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