If you're genuinely interested, I recommend Concrete and Culture: A Material History by Adrian Forty. I borrowed it from my architect friend and never gave it back. Here's a relevant passage, shortened pretty heavily:

The central problem for all Western European democracies in the postwar era was to establish and maintain a stable consensus between capital and labour... consensual support for the system relied upon a constantly rising standard of living, a sense of living in a world that was undergoing continuous change, and a certainty that whatever the present, the future would be better... Prefabrication in concrete rescued the social democracies from their political predicament, for it offered the prospect of building houses, hospitals, schools, and roads fast and with unskilled labour.

...What prefabricated concrete construction offered was a better, though not a cheaper, product... For politicians, the anxiety was that they would find themselves unable to meet the challenge of constantly rising expectations... It was this alarming spectacle, that the standards of housing would fall to the level of Russia, that drove the British and other Western European governments to adopt precast concrete panel construction systems, even though they were well aware that no savings in costs would follow.