Rose Friedman, economist, writer

SAN FRANCISCO - Rose Friedman, whose work with her husband, Milton, promoted individual freedom and changed the way central bankers think about money's role in the economy, has died.

She died yesterday of heart failure at her home in Davis, Calif., said Joe DiLaura, spokesman for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice in Indianapolis.

She was around 97 years old. Her exact birth date is unknown because records were lost, he said.

Her husband died in 2006.

The couple's 1980 book, Free to Choose, demonstrated how the government can undermine economic prosperity and concluded that inflation can be produced only by rapid growth in money supply.

In a 2003 speech, Ben Bernanke, now chairman of the Federal Reserve, said "one can hardly overstate" the couple's influence on policy.

Their efforts played a role in decisions that ranged from severing the dollar's peg to gold in the 1970s to ending the military draft, according to Allan H. Meltzer, an economic historian and Carnegie Mellon University professor.

They conceived or improved upon numerous ideas that remain central to public-policy debates, including vouchers to help parents select the schools their children attend, legalizing drugs, and privatizing Social Security.

Milton Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics, credited his wife with being an "active partner" in all his work since they met in the early 1930s, according to his autobiography posted online by Nobel organizers.

Rose Director was born in December 1911 in a village now in Ukraine, she and her husband wrote in a memoir. Her family foundation said she was born a year earlier.

At 2, she moved with her mother, sisters and brothers to Portland, Ore., where her father owned a small general store.

She attended Reed College in Portland before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she met Milton Friedman in economics class.

In her career, she worked on the staffs of the National Resources Committee in Washington, where she studied consumer purchases, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.